Ironweed by William Kennedy

That scab was the first man Francis Phelan ever killed. His name was Harold Allen and he was a single man from Worcester, Massachussetts, a member of the IOOF, of Scotch-Irish stock, twenty-nine years old, two years of college, veteran of the Spanish-American War who had seen no combat, an itinerant house painter who found work in Albany as a strikebreaker and who was now sitting across the aisle of the bus from Francis, dressed in a long black coat and a motorman's cap.

Why did you kill me? was the question Harold Allen's eyes put to Francis.

Ironweed is a prime example of the letdown of strong memories; some books you think of very highly at one point in your life only to find upon re-reading them that, though still good, they don't live up to the way you remember them.

Francis Phelan is an ex-ballplayer, an ex-father, and an ex-husband, but he is currently a bum. He has returned to the Albany his youth with his bum ladyfriend Helen, to do bum things like taking small jobs and drinking and sleeping in old ruined cars and drinking. This is the time of the Great Depression, and Phelan's condition is unexceptional; he lives in a subterranean bum culture where he knows everyone and is known by everyone. Francis has no illusions about the cause of his poverty: He is his own downfall. But he is also the downfall of others, and on this pair of days in Albany--Halloween and All Saints' Day--he finds himself being followed by those whose death he has caused in his life. None of these murders is indefensible--the killing of the scab was (mostly) unintentional; another bum he killed when attacked; a horse thief he simply failed to pull onto a moving train-car before he was shot in the back. And yet they are attached to Francis in death nonetheless.

The most significant of these is his son Gerald, whom he dropped as an infant, a crime for which Francis has not forgiven himself and which caused him to leave home. Gerald does not follow Francis around, but they "meet" in the beginning of the book, when Francis visits the graveyard:

In his grave, a cruciformed circle, Gerald watched the advent of his father and considered what action might be appropriate to their meeting. Should he absolve the man of all guilt, not for the dropping, for that was accidental, but for the abandonment of the family, for craven flight when the steadfast virtues were called for? Gerald's grave trembled with superb possibility. Denied speech in life, having died with only monosyllabic goos and gaahs in his vocabulary, Gerald possessed the gift of tongues in death...

Gerald, through an act of silent will, imposed on his father the pressing obligation to perform his final acts of expiation for abandoning the family. You will not know, the child silently said, what these acts are until you have performed them all. And after you performed them you will not understand that they were expiatory any more than you have understood all the other expiation that has kept you in such prolonged humiliation. Then, when these final acts are complete, you will stop trying to die because of me.

Perhaps Francis sees his life as a slow death, inching aimlessly toward the grave that others keep falling into. But perhaps it is through the bum's life--the sickness, the hunger, the decreptitude--that Francis is unconsciously repaying the immensity of his sins. Late in the book Francis revisits the house of his estranged wife, and looks on as the collected souls he has killed build a set of bleachers in the yard. Though Francis' steps toward rehabilitation are small and they seem to come without premeditation, we are invited to see them as a grand finale in which wrongs finally become righted. There is a strong undercurrent of Catholicism in Ironweed, and this is a particularly Catholic idea: To be of a bum is to wear a hairshirt for decades; forty years of saying "hail-mary."

Bits like the ones I quoted above keep the novel interesting, but they are ponderous and Ironweed never seems to come up for air. Even in Francis' rehabilitation the sense of loss is crushing, and Kennedy's slow, genealogically detailed style makes it sometimes a difficult slog. One exception is a long chapter in which we follow Helen, who has left Francis to fend for himself, as she does what bums do all day: wander and scrounge for food. Without the troop of the dead following the narrative, it becomes lighter and more fluid, and perhaps Helen is just more genuinely likeable than Francis. And I think perhaps the conceit of the dead physically following a man around is too doggedly literal; Kennedy shows Francis his ghosts to remind him that they are there, but they are given awfully little to do and too often seem untethered to present events.

Thinking back on the book now, after having put it down for about a week, perhaps my initial thoughts were unfair: Ironweed has a lot to think about, probably more for me now than it did in high school. And yet, I don't think I'll be picking it up a third time.

Cannery Row by John Steinbeck

There is no golden afternoon next to the cliff. When the sun went over it at about two o'clock a whispering shade came to the beach. The sycamores rustled in the afternoon breeze. Little water snakes slipped down to the rocks and then gently entered the water and swam along through the pool, their heads held up like little periscopes and a tiny wake spreading behind them. A big trout jumped in the pool. The gnats and mosquitoes which avoid the sun came out and buzzed over the water. All of the sun bugs, the flies, the dragonflies, the wasps, the hornets, went home. And as the shadow came to the beach, as the first quail began to call, Mack and the boys awakened. The smell of the chicken stew was heartbreaking. Hazel had picked a fresh bay leaf from a tree by the river and he had dropped it in. The carrots were in now. Coffee in its own can was simmering on its own rock, far enough from the flame so that it did not boil too hard. Mack awakened, started up, stretched, staggered to the pool, washed his face with cupped hands, hacked, spat, washed his mouth, broke wind, tightened his belt, scratched his legs, combed his wet hair with his fingers, drank from the jug, belched and sat down by the fire. "By God that smells good," he said.

I should've read this in high school, back when living out that scene was my daydream and greatest aspiration. That outdoor beatnik lifestyle, the zen-like indifference to materialism, poverty and public image, that's what I got from Cannery Row. This is a street (like, for real) in Monterey, California lined with sardine canneries and, by Steinbeck's telling, a very respectable whorehouse, Lee Chong's grocery, and a marine biology lab, populated by a close-knit community of starving artists, care-free bums, and assorted destitute but kind-hearted individuals.

Much of the book is based on Steinbeck's own experience in Monterey, and I know that at least one character, Doc, the marine biologist, is based on a close friend of his. Doc, a man after my own heart, has a passion for beer, octopi, Gregorian chanting, and women, and is a well-loved and well-known figure in the small neighborhood. Mack and the boys are a kindly gang of bums whose MO is to obtain and imbibe whiskey, or anything they can get. Mack is brilliant, and through his shrewd dealings they manage to get a house (The Palace Flophouse and Grill), and spend most of the novel trying to do something nice to repay Doc for all of his kindness. But most of their good intentions go awry for the same reasons that they became bums in the first place: inability or disinterest in worrying over anything other than pleasure and friendship.

The novel is really a collection of short stories centered around Cannery Row, telling the individual dramas and comedies of its residents. Doc and Mack and the boys are the most recurring and pivotal characters, and really the only drawn-out plotline. Just the stories on their own are wonderful for their humor and the quirks and tics of each resident. Collected, they're all a testament to the vibrance and ingenuity that thrives in a place familiar with poverty. The closest the book comes to philosophizing is Doc's revelation that Mack and the boys are better off than most:

Doc said, "Look at them. There are your true philosophers, I think," he went on, "that Mack and the boys know everything that has ever happened in the world and possibly everything that ever will happen. I think they survive in this particular world better than other people. In a time when people tear themselves to pieces with ambition and nervousness and covetousness, they are relaxed. All of our so-called successful men are sick men, with bad stomachs, and bad souls, but Mack and the boys are healthy and curiously clean. They can do what they want. They can satisfy their appetites without calling them something else." This speech so dried out Doc's throat that he drained his beer glass. He waved two fingers in the air and smiled. "There's nothing like that first taste of beer," he said.

I don't think that could ever not be relevant. It fit in the 1940's, and it fits now. It was kind of a shock to go from John Updike's overwhelmingly complex, strikingly human Rabbit to Steinbeck's whimsical Doc and Mack, who are mostly simple and straightforward, sort of fleshed out personality traits and desires. I've been reading that Steinbeck's other works are much more serious, and not nearly as lighthearted, so I'm glad to have stared with this one. I found absolutely nothing to dislike about this book. It might not be a symbol-ridden, broad-reaching metaphor for the human condition, but it's beautifully nostalgic and simple, and makes me wish I lived in Monterey.

John Updike worked for The New Yorker at 25 and was a successful author by 27. John Steinbeck was first a chemist, an apprentice painter, hod-carrier (had to Wikipedia that one), estate caretaker, Big Sur surveyor, and itinerant fruit picker. Keep hope alive!

EDIT: I forgot to mention how much I love paperbacks that were printed before I was born. This one is about eight months older than me.