Canisius College

Review: Roscoe, By William Kennedy. New York: Viking. 291pp. $24.95.

By Mark Shechner

There is, we are told, an Irish word for the poetry of place, in which history, myth, and folklore combine to enliven a particular landscape and reveal its inmost heart: Dinnsheanchas.¹   Whether William Kennedy understood himself to be working in this ancient tradition when he began his cycle of Albany novels I can't say, but the outcome is a body of work that amply, and wonderfully, fulfills that description.  No writer of our time better exemplifies what it means to be devoted to one locale than Kennedy.  He has told the story often of his failed attempt to become a literary expatriate in Puerto Rico, only to find that the writing that he did there felt abstract and disembodied.  It was not until he returned home in 1963, after his father had become ill, and went to work as a reporter for the Albany Times-Union that he discovered the keys to his muse.  His imagination, he has said, "has become fused with a single place, and in that place finds all the elements that a man ever needs for the life of the soul."  In a recent article in the New York Times, Kennedy quotes Henry James's observation in his essay on Hawthorne, that "art blooms only where the soil is deep, that it takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature, that it needs a complex social machinery to set a writer in motion."²

Over a span of seven novels to date, Kennedy has done for Albany, New York what Charles Dickens did for London, James Joyce for Dublin, and William Faulkner did for Jackson, Mississippi: bring it to life as that small world that, without giving up a shred of its particularity, stands for larger things.  Kennedy's interlocking stories of Phelans and Quinns, McCalls, Conways, Fitzgibbons, and Daugherties give us in exquisite and close-grained miniature a history of the Irish in America, from their arrival as tired, poor, and huddled masses in the mid-19th Century, in flight from the great famine and British tyranny, up to the middle years of the last century, when their urban political machines, fueled by underdog resentment and held together by clan loyalty and political patronage, controlled America's eastern cities.  From that power base they elected an Irish president in 1960.  William Kennedy has not brought his saga quite so far forward as the election of John F. Kennedy - no immediate relation -  but he doesn't have to.  His portraits of the fictional McCall machine in action, modeled on an actual one run by Albany, New York's O'Connell family, imply much of what we need to know about the Irish rise from exclusion and poverty to partnership and power in America.  

Whether Kennedy, who is now 74-years-old, has the stamina to press ahead and produce yet more novels, we can only guess, and hope.  The hopeful news is that his mentor and benefactor, Saul Bellow, has eleven years on him and is still writing.  Certainly in O Albany!³ (1983), that vade mecum of Albanian history and politics, from which Kennedy has drawn material for his novels, there is enough stirring legend, solid demographic research, and breezy anecdote for seven more.  The material is inexhaustible.  O Albany! and its attendant novels call to mind the phrase coined by anthropologist Clifford Geertz to describe an ideal of anthropological reporting: thick description. Let's raise a glass to its growing even thicker.

If you haven't been reading Kennedy's Albany novels all along, why not start with the new one, Roscoe?   Though the books are all roughly connected by actual history and by elaborate character crossovers, they can be read in any order, and Roscoe distills many of their themes.  They take long views of politics and life force, treachery and honor, money and status, drinking and dealing, democracy and The Democrats, the sins of the fathers and the expiations of the sons, or, as in a proper up-by-your-bootstraps fiction, the fortunes of the fathers and the power of the sons.  And amid the hustlers and gangsters, the statehouse hacks and the pork barrel pols, the lawyers and the cops, the ward healers and the petty thieves, the tough-guy swagger and the masculine oratorios of daily speech, there is the occasional bullet.  The tight muscle of plot that marked the early novels, Legs, Billy Phelan's Greatest Game, and Ironweed, however, has lately relaxed into meander, but as the stories grow shaggier, they grow fuller; the canvas broadens into landscape, and plot grows busy with diversion, reminiscence, and blarney to spare.  Roscoe Conway of Roscoe may be at first glance just another unscrupulous warrior on behalf of the one principle that Kennedyites hold dear  - coming out on top - but he has cunning and style going for him.  He is a wizard and a fixer; someone even calls him "a bootlegger of the soul, a mythic creature made of words and wit and wild deeds and boundless memory."  That must be a Democrat speaking.  Ask a Republican to describe Roscoe, and the word would be scoundrel. 

It is August 14, 1945, Japan has surrendered and the War is over.  That means that Roscoe Conway, Patsy McCall, and Elisha Fitzgibbon, the brain trust of the Albany Democratic Party, have one day for merriment at the Kenmore Hotel, "eternal center of mirth and jazz and women and ready-to-wear myth."  Then they have to plan a war of their own, against the Governor, who is going to make a run at the Presidency, using a crackdown on Albany vice - gambling, prostitution, and the McCalls - as his stepping stone.  Gov. Thomas Dewey, who would be nosed out by Harry Truman in 1948, is not mentioned by name, but we all know.  The situation is local; the stakes are national.

Everything is set: Elisha Fitzgibbon's son Alex, who had given up the Mayor's position to go into the Army, is back.  He is smart, handsome, and decorated, a rich man's son with a common man's heart.  But first a third party candidate has to be found to draw off some Republican votes, and Roscoe comes up with one George (Cutie) LaRue, a legislative lobbyist and Party factotum who will do as he is instructed: first, not campaign, and second, not win.  Then some rot has to be cleared away.  The machine has been in power for decades, and there are termites in the woodwork: bribes, kidnapings, betrayals, fixes and fixers, fortunes and payoffs, con men, hoodlums, cockfights, cops in the pocket, judges in the bag, and all manner of nightcrawlers and vulvaceous creatures.  Roscoe is a political wizard, but his heart is exhausted from too much sex and too many miracles: daily loaves and fishes and bluepoint oysters.  He wants nothing more than to leave politics and attend to his weary heart and his threadbare amours.  When Elisha takes his own life on V-J night after destroying his files, how much magic has Roscoe got left?

Roscoe's job is to shape up a McCall machine grown sloppy with success.   The word is out that the crackdown is coming, while the McCall brothers are half-asleep, distracted by a blood feud over fighting roosters.  A pimp, who happens also to be an informer for the State, turns up dead.  One policeman kills another over a raid gone sour, and the murdered policeman is Roscoe's brother O.B. 

But shouldn't Roscoe start by shaping himself up?  He is in his fifties and overweight, heartsick, and weary of politics, when he learns that he has to soldier on.  A man of spotty, fickle romances, he is lovesick.  Elisha's body is barely in the grave when Roscoe makes a move on the widow, Veronica, who had been his squeeze way back in the Bronze Age.  But she had chosen Elisha for his money.  Veronica's feckless sister, Pamela, whom Roscoe had married as a booby prize when Veronica married Elisha, surfaces, claiming to be the real mother of Alex's younger brother Gilby.  (She is, but even she is uncertain of the father.)  Little wonder that Roscoe suffers from congestive heart failure and needs to have fluid drawn from his chest.  Alex Fitzgibbon wants to regain the Mayor's office, which means that Roscoe has to get back into harness:  pull strings, flex muscles, bang heads, control damage, conceal this, spin that, watch his diet, and keep his mitts off Veronica Fitzgibbon.

No, the novel doesn't sort it all out, and Roscoe has to have his chest cut open to release the nastiness that has settled there.  There is no tidy plot here.  Never mind that.  In a sprawling novel like this, plot is only a ragtag chariot for getting from morning to night and for hauling onto the stage the main attractions: the vivid characters, the fiendish scenarios, and the bright, exuberant banter.  Wherever Roscoe is going, to the mayor's mansion, the hospital, the local brothel, or the scrap yard, he has the gift of galumptious talk, like William Kennedy himself.  His political axioms ("Life without betrayal is not life") amount to a Devil's Dictionary of practical homilies.  He is the Ben Franklin of deceit and maneuver.  "Honesty is the best policy for people striving to be poor, and an honest man's word is as good as his bail bondsman.  But as a practical matter, if a man insists on dealing only with honest men he'll have to stop dealing."  He recalls a conversation back in 1932, when Patsy McCall had offered Elisha the governorship, and Elisha had refused.  "All you have to do is sell Patsy your soul," Roscoe had pleaded.  "Didn't I do that a long time ago?"  "A soul as big as yours, you get to sell it more than once."

As for survival, "It's at the heart of Manifest Destiny and the lemming society, of the mad oligarchs, the killer hordes, the holy despots, and also Dracula, who certainly knows how to preserve his soul.  How?  You get the money.  How do you get the money? . . .  Get it any way you can.  Money buys survival.  Too bad about that stock market" (emphasis mine).  You can take Kennedy's Roscoe-isms any way you like: as leaks from a windbag or as pearls before swine: precious insights that everyone knows but nobody tells.  But that is why we have novels, to take us in through the back door of the show, where, as Oscar Levant famously said, we can see past the fake tinsel down to the real tinsel.  Roscoe says, "Power is based in the deep comprehension and perverse love of deception, especially self-deception, and any man who seeks power through truth is either a fool or a loser."  Never mind that Roscoe himself is destined for the scrap heap, as a spiffy new politics of image takes hold at the end of the war.  As a bon mot machine, he is priceless.

I can't entirely believe in Roscoe as a person, and apparently, unlike the book's other characters, he has no precise real-life antecedent.   He is too much the robot of his insatiable appetites and his endless duties, as well as a stick for beating the swindle of political saintliness, which Roscoe appears to identify as the uniquely Republican influenza.  And nobody I've ever met thinks on his feet as quickly as he does.  But I'll take him as he is.  The words and wit are quite enough, and how can you not love a guy  who can say of his ex-girlfriend, "If sex were bazookas, she could've taken Saipan all by herself."  If Roscoe is Albany's Machiavelli, giving advice to a young prince, he is also our reminder that behind every well-scrubbed image there is a machine humming away to gratify our perverse love of deception.  And he offers sound advice to buyers of bathtub whisky: "Pour a little on the sidewalk and light it.  If it gives a blue flame, drink it.  If it's yellow, sell it and run."   

*   *   *

A book like Roscoe will have two audiences: Albanians (as the denizens of Albany are called) and the rest of us, and it has to work for both.  For all it has to have whatever is needed on its own terms to be a satisfactory work of fiction and for the Albanians, it has to be faithful enough to their own history, despite its obvious transformations of headlines into lore and lore into visions, to bring it to life for them.  The Albanians will have to speak up for themselves, but here is something of what they might see.

Alex Fitzgibbon is a fictionalized version of Erastus Corning, who would first be elected Mayor of Albany in 1941, and, after a break for World War II, would return to be elected to office for a total of eleven four-year terms, a record for political longevity that beats, as Kennedy reminds us in O Albany!, the likes of Trujillo, Franco, Somoza, Stalin, Mao, Henry VIII, and, by a nose, Augustus Caeser.  (Warning.  Fidel Castro is closing in fast on the record.)  And he did it democratically, with a little help from his friends, Dan O'Connell and the Democratic Party.  Alex's father, Elisha Fitzgibbon, who made his fortune in steel, is loosely modeled on Edwin Corning, father of Erastus, who, though Protestant and Brahmin, grew up with the O'Connell brothers and helped them found the modern Albany Democratic machine, which first came to power with the election of William Hackett as Mayor in 1921.  Albany has not had a Republican mayor since. 

The McCall Brothers, Patsy and Bindy, are modeled on the O'Connells, Dan and Ed (and a third, John or Solly), whose political machine ran the Democratic Party and Albany politics for a half century, until Dan O'Connell's death in 1977.   No comparable political machine, not even Tammany Hall, ever exercised such complete dominion over a municipal politics.  Kennedy tells a wonderful story, in O Albany! and elsewhere about the time Dan O'Connell was stranded on a desert island with another man and all they had to eat was one coconut. They decided to vote on who would eat it, and Dan won, 110 to 1.  That tells you much about the staying power of the O'Connell machine and also why the State house in Albany, which would be sometime possession of the Republicans, was always poised to investigate Democratic malfeasance and to crush the machine with subpoenas, if it could not defeat it electorally.  They were never successful, and as Kennedy records in O Albany!, it was Dewey who blinked first when the chips were down.  Later, Governor Nelson Rockefeller would take on the O'Connell machine and fare no better.  In a speech too long to quote in full - and you should buy the book in order to read it -  Roscoe Conway's father, Felix, tutors his son on how it is done.

''How do you get the money, boy? If you run 'em for office and they win, you charge 'em a year's wages. Keep taxes low, but if you have to raise 'em, call it something else. The city can't do without vice, so pinch the pimps and milk the madams. Anybody that sells the flesh, tax 'em. If anybody wants city business, thirty percent back to us. Maintain the streets and sewers, but don't overdo it. Well-lit streets discourage sin, but don't overdo it. If they play craps, poker or blackjack, cut the game. If they play faro or roulette, cut it double. Opium is the opiate of the depraved, but if they want it, see that they get it, and tax those lowlife bastards. If they keep their dance halls open 24 hours, tax 'em twice. If they run a gyp joint, tax 'em triple. If they send prisoners to our jail, charge 'em rent, at hotel prices. Keep the cops happy and let 'em have a piece of the pie. A small piece. Never buy anything that you can rent forever. If you pave a street, a three-cent brick should be worth thirty cents to the city. Pave every street with a church on it. Cultivate priests and acquire the bishop. Encourage parents to send their kids to Catholic schools; it lowers the public-school budget.''

 It continues:

''If an uptown voter won't register Democrat, raise his taxes. If he fights the raise, make him hire one of our lawyers to reduce it in court. Once it's lowered, raise it again next year. Knock on every door and find out if they're sick or pregnant or simple-minded, and vote 'em. If they're breathing, take 'em to the polls. If they won't go, threaten 'em. Find out who's dead and who's dying, which is as good as dead, and vote 'em. There's a hell of a lot of dead and they never complain. The opposition might cry fraud but let 'em prove it after the election. People say voting the dead is immoral, but what the hell, if they were alive they'd all be Democrats. Just because they're dead don't mean they're Republicans.''