The Flaming Corsage by William Kennedy
Murtaugh, Daniel M.
OLYMPUS IN ALBANY The Flaming Corsage William Kennedy Viking, $23.95,209pp. Daniel M. Murtaugh Headers new to William Kennedy may know that his previous novels constitute a developing...
...Katrina settles that question in his favor...
...The fact that we can diagnose her madness early on simply gives no defense against her allure, and it offers no key to the irreducible mystery of character that brings her to life...
...He is descended from despised Irish laborers who dug the Erie Canal...
...It is not necessary to give all the details of this counter-plot here, but two of its features should be noted...
...It will also pierce Katrina's breast with the flaming corsage of the title, a burning stick hurled from an exploding elevator shaft...
...With an arresting achronology, that scandal, in 1908, is presented to us in the novel's first pages, in the flat objectivity of a tabloid news story that does not even name the principals...
...The Daughertys are like pagan gods to the Phelans, baffling their simple Catholic piety...
...The gods of Homer, Virgil, and Ovid are essentially cruel and trivial beings, incapable of loyalty or honest affection...
...One is the consistent role of Thomas Maginn, a lank, cynical Pandarus poisoned by jealousy of Edward's success with women, who begins and ends the novel proposing to Edward that the hired favors of prostitutes exhaust the mystery of love...
...The scar that she bears for the rest of her life expresses her conviction that Edward killed her father and sister...
...It is...
...Daniel M. Murtaugh Headers new to William Kennedy may know that his previous novels constitute a developing Faulknerian saga of Albany, New York...
...So they descend to earth from time to time, make love with mortals, incite wars among them, and otherwise set in motion chains of consequence which they ultimately ignore as the mortals cannot...
...In each of these disruptions, an enigmatic recapitulation serves the reader as a premonition...
...More specifically, they were victims of the hot fatality of his love in which she was complicit...
...The Phelan novels are set in the 1930s and 1950s, but they hark back to events just before the turn of the century, when Francis Phelan, an eighteen-year-old with a major-league pitching arm and a streak of stubborn heroism, is seduced, virtually plucked from a tree in his backyard, by his imperiously beautiful and mad neighbor, Katrina Daugherty...
...The first-time reader of Kennedy will only guess at this from the pages of The Flaming Corsage, and this is a part of its meaning...
...It is a gorgeously written story that stands well on its own even as it invites the reader into the other novels...
...Edward attempts to set all this right, to transcend history for the sake of his love for Katrina, in a grand gesture of hubris that ends in fiery disaster...
...For those who have read the others, particularly those dealing with the Phelan family (Billy Phelan's Greatest Game, Ironweed, and Very Old Bones), there is the added pleasure of recognition and deepened perspective...
...In this novel we seem at times to inhabit the realm of the gods where the affairs of mortals like the Phelans are largely covered over with an Olympian disregard...
...Kennedy has been plausibly but (I think) inaccurately criticized as a macho novelist...
...In marrying, they insult both their heritages...
...The comparison with classical mythology-for example, the interactions of Zeus, Hera, and Aphrodite with Odysseus, Achilles, and Hector-can be pursued in more detail...
...Just when he seems to have won them over with the extravagant gifts of a sealskin coat and a thoroughbred racing horse, the hotel catches fire...
...She is descended on her mother's side from New York Dutch aristocracy and on her father's side from Oliver Cromwell himself, the nemesis of Ireland who, between 1641 and 1652, gave glory to God by destroying more than half its population...
...The Greek gods depend on the mortals to give interest to their lives which, because they cannot end, lack drama and pathos...
...There is the same sort of juxtaposition of narrative textures, journalistic versus fictional, the implication being that the weight of truth falls somewhere between perceived act and reconstructed intention...
...Katrina, in particular, infects Francis with a morbid sexuality born of her febrile reading of Baudelaire and Verlaine...
...Edward's friends show none of the solid virtues that we (and Katrina) recognize in his parents...
...Although they escape, largely through Edward's heroism, the fire will eventually cost the lives of Katrina's father and sister...
...In 1894, some eight years after their marriage, he invites Katrina's still unreconciled parents and her sister to a lavish dinner at Albany's Delavan Hotel...
...In dropping back to 1885 in the second chapter, the novel sets itself the task of humanizing that grotesquely reductive opening text...
...Tabloid flash-forwards signal later narrative turning points as well...
...They may wonder whether this sixth in the series is a good place to jump in...
...For the mortals, for the Phelans in this instance, these consequences are their fates...
...Nor does Edward in the company of those friends...
...In the long slow death of love that marks their enduring marriage, Katrina's beauty and distinction become all the more marked, and Edward becomes ensnared in an affair with an ambitious young actress and a sordid chain of practical jokes that ends in a scandalous "love-nest" murder-suicide...
...The novel's finest achievement is the character of Katrina...
...In The Flaming Corsage, privileged mortals aspire to a godlike superiority to fate, a fate that is defined genealogically, for we are all bound by our family histories...
...The affair precipitates an explosive scene in the Phelan household and the first of a series of estrangements that turns Francis into a failed father and a homeless bum...
...It helps that most chapter headings include dates...
...Albany's high society in the gilded age has much the same effect...
...Tricked by the accidents of fortunate birth, superior education, and enlarged imagination, Edward and Katrina are tempted to believe that they can step outside of the matrix of destiny...
...I was reminded of the use of newsreels to advance the story of Citizen Kane...
...The freedom granted by their immortality is a solvent to these and most of the other moral qualities that we value in humans...
...That leads to the love-nest scandal...
...She is irresistible...
...She is the wife of Edward Daugherty, a playwright of swelling reputation who, in a different way, also appropriated Francis when he used him as a model for a character in his first play...
...All this was prefigured in her courtship dream of him as a blue panther leaping out of her kitchen breadbox, and in the impulse that led her to offer her virginity to him in a graveyard...
...The other is the continuing relevance of the Olympian analogy that I suggested earlier...
Vol. 123 • September 1996 • No. 15
