Quinn's Book
Quinn, Peter A.
INCANDESCENT ALBANY QUOIN'S BOOK William Kennedy Viking, $18.95, 273 pp. Peter A. Quinn With Quinn's Book, William Kennedy adds another installment to his Albany Cycle of novels. The first...
...The love of his life, Maud Fallon, whom he pursues from line two of the book until its last words...
...Nor have they fallen asleep, awaiting the encore of the Last Judgment...
...This is the past that everyone can be comfortable with...
...He is also in possession of an ancient Irish disc (" his Celtic potato plate") that his parents brought over from Ireland and whose secret usefulness he is never able to figure out...
...Four of the five occupants drown...
...Lucky Quinn...
...Most of these events really happened...
...The decision I had made so long ago, to live my life according to the word, reached its apogee in the war and then descended into the bathetic dumps of faceless slaughter...
...Mine was clearly a life fulfilled by language...
...Meanwhile, much of Albany is burning to the ground, a blaze caused by a washerwoman whose bonnet was set afire by sparks from the burning quay...
...Is Quinn's Book, then, a historical novel about Albany...
...Quinn's search also has a metaphysical dimension...
...Lucky us to have an artist like William Kennedy to regale and entertain, telling his tales with such wit and verve and in the process creating something so memorable and true...
...Here the corpse of La Ultima is resurrected by the love-making of John the Braun, her boatman/ rescuer, and what begins as necrophilia ends as revivifying fornication...
...wounding an unsuspecting half-dozen people, killing two horses and a pregnant cat on the quay, and loosing a tidal wave that swept every object store-housed on the Great Pier.'' Maud, La Ultima's niece and the sole survivor of the incident on the Hudson, is taken by her rescuers to the house of the Staats, an ancient Albany Dutch family whose saga encapsulates much of New York's colonial history...
...The echoes of these spiritual communications surround Quinn...
...A collection of curios...
...Consider the remains of Amos Staats once they are exposed to view: "His face had begun to swell: cheeks, forehead, neck, eyelids all rising as might a loaf of leavening bread, a shocking sight from which we could not take our eyes...
...America at the middle of the last century was incandescent with the bright lights of seers and clairvoyants, with Mormonism, mesmerism, spiritualism, phrenology, and phrenomagnetism- doctrines that fudged the line between the material and the spiritual, and offered a view of the eternal reality as near as the mysterious tapping ("as of someone gently rapping") first overheard by the Fox sisters in upstate New York...
...The dead walk among us...
...as Maud now was...
...The first two, Legs and Billy Phe-lan's Greatest Game, won critical praise but sank largely unnoticed...
...Surviving the opening rush of catastrophes, Quinn observes, "I did begin to see that violence was the norm of this bellicose world...
...Yet in writing about what was worst in the world an unconscionable pang of pleasure dogged my every line...
...We want our history as our textbooks and most historical novels gave (and continue to give) it to us: settled, decorous, purposeful...
...And then he exploded . . . upward and outward, his hands and face disappearing beneath a great grayish puff of dust tinged with pale blue, a puff that ascended fully six feet above the coffin and spread over all in a melancholy haze...
...A bridge collapses from the weight of spectators to the drowning, with another forty or so fatally dunked...
...We abhor not vacuums but absurdities...
...The hero is laid out like history itself: "Amos in his soldier's cap and uniform, arms crossed on his chest, a warrior's medal over his heart, lying as if asleep...
...The consequences of what they took for truth continue to shape our world...
...Quinn eventually does...
...It carries the Cycle back in time to its mid-nineteenth-century origins but is neither mere genealogy nor a clone of stories already told...
...The age he lives in sees to that...
...Quinn's Book won't let us have it that way, all neat and dignified, hair combed, pants pressed, shoes shined...
...He believes those meanings are as available as the past he sees displayed at a patriotic bazaar in Albany during the Civil War, where items such as Myles Standish's pistol, Washington's writing desk, and Madison's cane are on display and, for a dollar, you can take a chance on winning the original hand-written draft of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation...
...then Maud and Quinn were at least ready for love...
...Move toward the verification of freedom, and avoid gratuitous absolutes...
...Quinn has visions of his own...
...The third, Ironweed, brought the Cycle-and the cycler-fame, prosperity, and the attention of Hollywood...
...Daniel Quinn begins, as we all do, by assuming the meanings of life can be searched out, handled, possessed...
...their saintliness or silliness will be forever felt...
...A boat ferrying La Ultima, one of the world's great courtesans, across the Hudson is crushed by ice...
...Yes, in the same way Joyce's Ulysses is a historical novel about Dublin...
...Stephen Dedalus tells only a half-truth (at best) when he says, "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake...
...Quinn takes to heart the advice of Will Cana-day, the editor of the Albany Chronicle: ' 'Remember this, Daniel...
...Quinn's Book proceeds with the force of a cyclone: the Cycle as spinning helix...
...Instead, it is to play with the mirrors of place and time, to mingle fantasy with fact, the recorded event with the mythical, the improbable with the impossible, piling one atop another until we see reflected in the resulting phantasmagoria the human truths that chronologies can never give us...
...The only thing worth fighting for is what is real to the self...
...Quinn's Book should add to that renown...
...As he understood but left unsaid, history is also part wet dream, part mummery, part Punch and Judy...
...He stops trying to find the Ultimate Truths and starts creating his own individual meanings...
...But take notice, Quinn's Book warns us: The dead are not dead...
...the Irish, I suppose...
...All this- and more-in the first thirty pages...
...Daniel has found the craft of words...
...Finally, he doesn't have to...
...Searcher becomes progenitor...
...is a reluctant practitioner of spiritualism, her career as a danseuse interrupted by the thunderous rappings of an insistent spirit...
...We resist these several truths...
...The luck of the Irish, I suppose...
...But the riots, floods, fires, drownings, wars, and conspiracies that fill Quinn's story are all the stuff of history...
...Not on the same day, and not in exactly the same way as Daniel Quinn, the book's narrator, recounts them...
...A wall of ice roars down the Hudson and explodes like "a Vesuvius of crystal...
...In Maud's arms he will set the Cycle spinning, Quinn begetting Quinn, the artist/father describing as well as creating his own history, "with no expectation of solving the mysteries but content merely to stare at them until they become as beautiful and valuable...
...He sees his first in the eye of the dead (but-soon-to-be-resurrected) La Ultima...
...It will let us look for a moment at this illusion in the form of the uncorrupted corpse of Amos Staats, half-Indian, half-Dutch boy hero of the Revolution, when his coffin is unsealed seventy-odd years after his death...
...The purpose is not to fool the reader into thinking he or she is seeing through a glass clearly what is now departed (although Joyce enjoyed creating that effect as one artistic device among many...
Vol. 115 • May 1988 • No. 10
