Fathers & their sons:

...I don't know, and I am not sure that Kennedy knows...

...Actually, however, it leads to a comic outcome, because every turn in the plot is caused by some sort of deus ex machina...

...It is a memento of his mother, and he scrutinizes what looks like hieroglyphics on its silver crucifix for a coded message from her, until the hieroglyphics yieldtheir true meaning: "scratches...

...He sits down to a dinner with them, which Kennedy, in a particularly nice stroke, does not describe...

...She is cast not as her former self, but as Martin's mother...

...The father's forgiveness in the parable is as arbitrary, and therefore as mysterious, as God's earlier demand for sacrifice...

...He contemplates writing about Billy's near perfect game at the Knights of Columbus bowling alley: He would point out how some men moved through the daily sludge of their lives and then, with a stroke, cut away the sludge and transformed themselves...

...Now the machine closes Billy out of Albany's night life, driving him from its smoky bars and poolhalls to the frozen reeds along the banks of the Hudson...

...Ultimately, he triumphs...

...Not their own imaginations, necessarily...

...This is the classical hero's stance...

...He cannot be distanced from us by their equivocating irony...

...In Billy Phelan's Greatest...

...If I lose it," he concludes, "I have stood for nothing, done nothing, been nothing...

...Its symbols were Abraham with the sword held over Isaac, or in reflexive rebellion, of Isaac transformed from sacrificial ram to avenging satyr...

...He repeats forms of "dance" ten times to create an asymmetrical free-verse rhythm that reaches out from the first "small dimensioned movements" to sweep "all America," defined as Broadway shows and Ziegfeld, into itself...

...Murray kicked him in the groin, creased his face, crunched his nose with the side of his shoe...

...Billy went out into the early freeze that was settling on Broadway and made a right turn into the warmth of the stairs to Louie's room, a place where even serious men sometimes go to seek the meaning magical webs, mystical coin, golden birds, and other artifacts of the only cosmos in town...

...But the gesture that transcends volition is also merely outside of volition...

...Daugherty is a journalist...

...My Phelan's Greatest Game and Iron weed take place seven years after the events of Legs, and E at about the same time as one another...

...Like the Odysseus figure of Dante and Tennyson, he gently turns aside Annie's suggestion that he could stay...

...That event set Francis on his life of running away, and the elder Daugherty saw in the episode, and in the young Francis Phelan, archetypes of the struggle of the immigrant Irish...

...What really happens is that Francis hops a freight out of town...

...The gangster is not a particularly close friend of Billy's, but he has backed Billy several times as a gambler, and, in the course of one night in the story, he probably saves Billy's life...

...The insight that enables her to see a good father, not an infanticide, bending over the broken body of their child enables her to recognize at once the returned father in the dirty bum standing on her doorstep twenty-two years later...

...The historical context (the Spanish Civil War and Orson Welles's "War of the Worlds" broadcast) impinges on the life of the city and is absorbed into thesharedconsciousnessofitsinhabitants.WhereLeradiates, Billy Phelan and Ironweed concentrate in a way that recalls the treatment of Dublin in Ulysses...

...In die course of the novel Francis returns to Albany, and the actress also comes back in a triumphant revival of Edward's play...

...Their memory lives in transcendent gestures-a dance, the toss of a bowling ball, the hurling of a mortally accurate smooth round stone-that evoke an eloquence in the author (or his surrogate narrator) that mocks itself for being merely verbal...

...He danced around Charlie, kicking elbows, ribs, shins, calves, and thighs, kicking ass and back and then kicking Charlie's face lightly, left foot, right foot.lightly, but still a kick, drawing blood, rolling the head from side to side like a leaky soccer ball...

...Yet what they became was not the result of a sudden act, but the culmination of all they had ever done: a triumph of self-development, the end of something general, the beginning of something specific...

...His story is a series of visions and encounters with the living and the dead...

...The magic consists in something as simple as the contrasts in the urban night between being outdoors and indoors, between the cold exterior darkness and the warm, smoky, close interior light...

...Billy is unencumbered by the ghosts that haunt the fathers and sons around him...

...Indeed, the city is a kind of organism, a central character in both...

...The heroes of the two novels are a son and his father, Billy and Francis Phelan', a hustler and a bum...

...Instead of a scab, Francis's victim this time is an American Legion night raider who attacks a hobo encampment as part of amob...

...Kennedy follows this in the figure of Annie, who welcomes the prodigal husband home simply because he showed up...

...Logically, Billy's situation leads only to a tragic outcome as the human powers of the hero succumb to the larger powers of destiny which have been challenged by his honor...

...They look back to the Gospels read at Mass, to the stories and illustrations in the family Bible, to the sacramental life, in short, to all of those adumbrations of a state of grace against which they must measure the self-made grace of the hero...

...n that a transgression can be forgiven...

...Isaac, the sacrificial ram of the Hebrew tradition, becomes the satyr of the Greek tradition, the goat-child whose anarchic lust negates all authority...

...The actress, remember, has taken the role of Martin's mother on the stage...

...He sympathizes with the kidnapped son and his father, but he won't be a stool pigeon and a sycophant to the powers that be...

...It is a magical setting...

...It confronts, in Francis, the reductive essence of the heroic ideal represented by Jack Diamond and Billy Phelan, the hero who is true to his transgression...

...This is the phrase of Martin Daugherty, a character who, though not the narrator, is-close enough to give voice to Kennedy's more complicated reflections...

...Francis is once again on the run...

...It may, on the other hand, tell us that the dream of return has supplanted the ghosts who have dogged his steps through Albany, and, like them, is irrecoverable...

...In the first two books, Jack "Legs" Diamond and Billy Phelan shine most brightly in the imaginations of deeper thinkers, the lawyer Marcus Gorman and the journalist Martin Daugherty, who admire them, make them present to us, and convey a troubled sense that this liberated heroism is also isolated, egotistically cut off from the obligations that ensnare the rest of us in family, community, and religion...

...When the boss asks Billy to spy on a minor gangster they suspect of being an accomplice in the snatch, he refuses...

...This figure haunts Martin Daugherty's dreams...

...In Ironweed he is very much out on a limb...

...The novel sometimes swerves into sentimentality (e.g., Francis's recollections of his courtship of Annie...

...Their structure and method, however, are strikingly different, determined by the tasks of their protagonists...

...There the river spirits summon Billy to suicide, but he scorns their summons, leaving them only the tribute of his hat It never occurs to Martin Daugherty to invoke Sophocles, but I do so to make one point: that Billy's situation is a classical one...

...After all, the prodigal son had only to show up, something his faithful brother resentfully points out...

...Billy's trade is apt, because the gambler depends upon luck, invoking it as the Christian invokes God's grace to complete what individual virtues can only begin...

...On self-made grace, observe Jack Diamond as he dances the Charleston in the Catskills with his mistress Kiki Roberts: Jack looked at her and his feet began to move, left out, right kick, right back, left back basic, guarded, then "C'mon, dance," Kiki urged, and he gave up his consciousness of the crowd and then left out, right kick, right back, left back expanded, vitalized and he was dancing, arms swinging, dancing, Jack Diamond, who seemed to ' do everything well, was dancing the Charleston and the Black Bottom, dancing them perfectly, the way all America had always wanted to be able to dance them-energetically controlled, as professionally graceful as his partner who had danced these dances for money in Broadway shows, who had danced them for Ziegfeld...

...e Kennedy is fascinated with gestures and objects whose talismanic power to embody large meanings is a consequence of their having no inherent meaning of their own...

...In this contingent world, the hero's action gains our respect by its authenticity, but it achieves its victories by accident...

...Martin is the perfect foil for Billy Phelan...

...From the vantage point provided by Annie's freely offered forgiveness, however, it is something else...

...An era finds its icon on a mountaintop, where Yeats asked how we can know the dancer from the dance...

...All of these men are Catholics, and, although the practice of their faith is (to put it kindly) in abeyance, the heroism that Legs and Billy embody and Gorman and Daugherty admire tends finally to be expressed in religious language...

...The ending may tell us that Francis holds in his heart the hope of return...

...This irresolution about Francis's character and destiny is accompanied by a more general rhetorical irresolution...

...Billy Phelan's Greatest Game is about "the inescapable presence of the absence of fathers...

...The plot is set in motion when a local bowling champ has a stroke, and Martin picks three winning horses named (like the kidnap victim) Charlie...

...Only to the estranged does die life of the modern city reveal itself, and in doing so it tests and proves the most essential qualities of the hero...

...His act is a conscious assertion of his self-defined character and destiny: "he had fled the folks because he was too profane a being to live among them...to counter a fearful pride in his own ability to manufacture the glory from which grace would flow...

...What happens in a wishful dream- and in sentences whose very grammar tries to make the dream real-is that he returns to "the holy Phelan eaves" and the protective love of Annie...

...Steeped in historical complication, haunted by prophetic dreams, Martin is Homer to Billy's Achilles...

...Its mere mechanism can be emptied of one sort of meaning and filled with another...

...Self-development has been thrust upon Billy because his father abandoned him...

...He simply says that it happened and lets us conclude that its wonder consists in its being a reconstituted routine...

...Earlier, however, she had been his father's mistress, and so Martin's revenge against his father is an act on behalf Of his wronged mother...

...When Martin symbolically violates his father's marriage bed with the actress, he is Isaac transformed vengefully to a satyr...

...The story's happy ending affirms the father's love, but it does so willfully, not out of any conviction that this is the way things must always turn out...

...They are controlled by the political machine he has offended (in ways I'll get to...

...Everything that is merely a dream is conveyed with indicative verbs...

...It almost seems as though this breaks Kennedy's heart and this is what makes the novel's final pages nearly defy interpretation...

...His sensibility is practical, focused on solving immediate, real problems...

...Murray the Goose, "left foot, right foot," is also a stylish hieh-kicker...

...The son of the political boss of Albany is kidnapped for ransom...

...The two passages repay a closer inspection...

...He is "a warrior...never a victim" whose guilt is all he has left...

...Everything that really happens is conveyed to us in conditional verbs...

...Billy's task in Greatest Game is to behave with honor in a field of action, so his story is a plot with threads diverging and recrossing in a labyrinth...

...Game, the alternative to the classical ethic of Billy was the patriarchal Old Testament ethic of Martin Daugherty...

...terms of his intentions rather than simply its consequences...

...Penelope, in contrast, is fooled by Odysseus's disguise as a beggar...

...The plot is resolved when Billy makes a mistake about where the kidnappers might be found and turns out to be right...

...He imagines the goat-child not as a participant in coitus but as a witness to it...

...Kennedy adds a doubleness to Isaac to match that of the Abraham/God figure...

...Being on the street means being at the mercy of the random eddies of urban life, especially the life of the night...

...He steps back into the bum's life, gets drunk, and reenacts the heroic murder that Edward Daugherty celebrated in bis play...

...A few days encompass them both, and they end on the same day, as Kennedy makes clear by pointed references to Billy's first wearing of a new hat in both novels...

...In the parable God and father, who were divided as Yahweh and Abraham, are reintegrated...

...Isaac relies on Abraham, but both he and Abraham must submit to God...

...Like the hurling of that smooth round stone that killed the scab, this killing, too, is an expression of Francis's athletic heroism: specifically, it is a home-run swing of a born baseball star which breaks the raider's back...

...Faced with two contrary claims on his loyalty, Billy's honor compels him to choose the nearer claim of the man who backed him...

...That heroism is called into question and finally baffled by the subversive notion that a transgression can be forgiven...

...it is that of Oedipus at Colonnus...

...Daugherty's now senile father, Edward, was a playwright who wrote a play about Billy Phelan's father, Francis, and his murderous toss of a stone at a scab in a trolley strike...

...Kennedy's hopes for him, expressed in an epigraph from Dante's Purgatorio and in a startling Dantesque paragraph on the last page about the empyrean, which "girds with light and love the primum mobile" and the entire universe, is at war with the author's sense of realism and his nostalgia for classical heroism and its choice of a tragic destiny...

...and now she was on the mountaintop with the king of the mountain, and they were king and queen of motion together, fluid with Fogarty's melody and beat...

...BiHy's problems culminate in his being shut out of the bars and poolrooms that are his milieu as a hustler...

...But a religion of filial piety must eventually deal with the fact that a father's authority can be the most arbitrary of all, partly because it reaches to our very consciences, as the pagan gods could never do...

...He acts with the unreflective authority of a classical hero and faces a classical hero's dilemma...

...It has a structural similarity to the situation of Antigone, torn between the claims of public authority and her pious familial duty to her dead brothers...

...Jesus' -parable of the prodigal son can be thought of as a corrective commentary on the story of Abraham and Isaac...

...The Democratic machine controls illegal gambling in Albany, and so it has an immediate control over Billy, whose livelihood as a gambler depends on tribute to the machine and on ready access to others who pay it...

...The story of Abraham and Isaac presents this dilemma in a palliative disguise...

...It fulfills rather precisely Dante's definition of damnation...

...Then Francis leaves...

...By the time we get to it, the extravagance of this paragraph is thoroughly earned...

...He denies himself the presence of a witty narrator/commentator, an educated Irishman with the gift of gab, that he had recourse to in Legs and Billy Phelan's Greatest Game...

...And, on behalf of his mother, Martin's passion, like Abraham uninterrupted by the angel, consumes the goat-child...

...FATHERS & THEIR SONS damelm murtaugh WILLIAM KENNEDY'S HERO-TRANSGRESSORS William Kennedy's three novels of Albany during the Great Depression-Legs.Billy Phelan's Greatest Game, and Iron- weed-celebrate heroes who are exem- plaiy types of marginal Americana, a gangster, a hustler, and a bum...

...While mis begins to sound like the function of an enchanted forest in a fairy tale, it is to Kennedy's credit that his Albany serves Ihis function without losing its gritty particularity...

...Popular Christian piety took this a step further, seeing the forgiving parental aspect of God most clearly in Jesus' mother...

...Again, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom adrift in Dublin...

...In the God of Abraham the Jews replaced the arbitrary power of the pagan deity with the humanly legitimate authority of a father...

...Although they deal with separate sequences of events, the two Phelan novels are chronologically intertwined...

...As empty of significance as the Our Fathers and Hail Marys that he mutters, the scratches nevertheless remain powerful signifi-ers of Jack's sense of the ultimate mystery of his own being, a sense that is endorsed by the adulation that the world pays him as its hero-outlaw...

...Jack, for example, carries and occasionally fingers a rosary...

...The heroic gestures of these three protagonists lift them from the drab mundane into the world of imagination...

...To the extent that Martin realizes this, he objectifies and separates himself from the goat-child...

...Kennedy draws on all we remember about the hero tested by the night forest before reaching the enchanted castle, or about the wise and foolish virgins whose judgment in the outer darkness determines their access to the warmth and light of the feast within...

...They are both "on the street" in the sense of being shut out of their homes by troubles large and small...

...Francis's task in Iron-weed is recognition and atonement...

...Here, Francis Phelan comes to us without the mediation of a Marcus Gorman or a Martin Daugherty...

...Kennedy's attempts to give voice to the inarticulate make some passages read a bit like Faulkner on automatic pilot But despite its lapses, Ironwe4di& peculiarly gripping...

...It is, in extremis, "the triumph of self-development" that Martin Daugherty celebrated in Billy Phelan...

...Jack looks at Kiki "and his feet began to move...

...Offstage, she resumes an affair with Martin, whose genuinely religious sensibility expresses itself in occasional sacrilege...

...The two later novels are more centered in the life of the city...

...Legs has B a gaudy, public air as its mythical hero projects his glamour from Albany and the Catskills across the nation and the world...

...Francis confers the blessings of a father on his children...

...Billy's world is a world without grace, but it takes Martin Daugherty's more highly developed sensibility to reflect on this absence of grace in a troubling image of Abraham and Isaac...

...He wrote another play about the scandal of his own adulterous affair with an actress...

...On the other hand, observe Diamond's feral hit man, Murray the Goose, as he worries a rival to near-death with his steel tipped shoes: Murray kicked him in the kneecap and he went down...

...The first thing that strikes us is that Kennedy is a writer who does not shrink from the grand verbal gesture...

...They wind their ways through the streets of Albany to a tentative reunion with one another...

...It separates the father's love (in the figure of Abraham) from his arbitrary power (the figure of God...

...This fascinates Martin, who feels he has not measured up to his own father's achievements, and who is disappointed in his son who attends a junior seminary, embracing the institutional religion that Martin prides himself at having (almost) cast off...