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Author William Kennedy reads the final lines of his 1983 novel "Ironweed" on stage at Capital Repertory Theatre in Albany on Wednesday evening at the conclusion of a marathon public performance. Scores of readers signed up to read passages during the event, which began at the nearby Albany Distilling Co. Bar & Bottle Shop.
One of Bernie Kolenberg's photographs from "The Shadow World." Buddy is in the center. (Courtesy William Kennedy)
"The Shadow World," a four-part series looking at "Albany's skid row," ran in four installments in 1964.
“Who cares about bums, especially bums in Albany?”
That’s how William Kennedy once summed up the response to his notion of producing a nonfiction book out of “The Secret World,” a four-part series on “Albany’s skid row” that he and photographer Bernie Kolenberg initially wrote for this newspaper in 1964. The two men had gotten close to the denizens of the city’s lower depths — the flophouses, soup kitchens and weed-choked fields where the homeless slept in decrepit cars — and thought their lives were worth chronicling. The series was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, but didn't win.
Last Saturday at my wife’s suggestion, I went in search of a digital version of the series and rather laboriously copied the third installment into our content-management system. I thought it would be a nice appetizer for the upcoming live community reading of a book Kennedy produced almost two decades later: “Ironweed,” the 1983 novel that, in a nice bit of symmetry, won the Pulitzer for fiction.
What will strike any reader of Kennedy’s Depression-set fourth novel is how much plot, character and even dialogue ("I won't hit ya ... I love ya some") echoes between "The Secret World" and "Ironweed" — including the presence of a lost soul called Helen who describes her descent from a well-to-do background.
This isn't to say that "Ironweed" is a naturalistic portrait; there are too many conversations between the living and the dead for that. As in all his fiction, the author is taking the raw material the world had put in front of him and transforming it in the foundry of his imagination into something new. Journalism can be art but should more often be craft; maybe fiction works in reverse.
I was initially disappointed to find that our digital photo archive doesn’t include any of Kolenberg’s images from the series except for those that I could screen-grab — producing a poor image that would do a disservice to the photographer’s memory to post online. We have a good collection of Kolenberg’s other work for the Times Union, as well as photos he produced for the Associated Press on assignment in Vietnam, where he was killed at age 38 in an air collision in 1965, the first American journalist to die in combat.
I reached out to Kennedy and his son, Brendan, and asked if they had any of the photos from “The Secret World” near to hand, in any format, and volunteered to drive out to Averill Park to help them root around. On Monday, Brendan zapped me an amazing image of three nighttime revelers passing a bottle of what looks like something sweet and strong. The photo didn’t run in the Times Union’s pages, because the journalists did their best to obscure their subjects' identities.
Reading through this discursive, funny and heartbreaking piece of reporting, I couldn’t help wondering what Kennedy’s editors thought six decades ago when he pitched the series, and later when he and Kolenberg turned in their work. Did they think readers would be repelled? That advertisers would protest at the depiction of the city’s seamy side? That somebody — such as Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, already embarked on his plan to scoop out the center of Albany and remake it as a government center rendered in clean Brutalist lines — would either launch a reform campaign or claim these ink-stained wretches had exaggerated the whole scene?
Wednesday afternoon, the "Ironweed" reading got rolling at the Albany Distilling Co. Bar & Bottle Shop. Kennedy was there with a glass of wine and numerous friends and admirers. I saw folks — academics, lobbyists, artists — I hadn't seen since before the pandemic. There was a celebratory and not valedictory air to the place even as so many of the attendees were aware that Dana Kennedy, the author's wife of 66 years, had died only a few weeks ago.
I thanked the Kennedy boys for digging out the Kolenberg photo. Brendan asked me if I had recognized the guy on the right — his future father, in his mid-30s with head downcast smoking a cigarette, his right hand obscured but maybe holding a beverage that was not a 1964-vintage soda. The reporter had previously acknowledged securing a bottle of muscatel as a getting-to-know-you gift for his subjects. (Not exactly allowable as a reporting expense under current Times Union standards and practices, but we're not going to try to claw it back at this late date.)
For the final sequence of readers, the party moved up the hill to Capital Repertory Theatre, where Kennedy ended the evening. I won't try to describe the last page of "Ironweed" except to say that it ventures from the celestial to a well-lit bedroom where a bum might find his rest. No one could read it better than the author, and when he was done he greeted the standing ovation with a grin, and a salute, and a wag of his cane that was worthy of Fred Astaire.
Seiler: Who cares about bums in Albany?
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04.11.2023
This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigate
Author William Kennedy reads the final lines of his 1983 novel "Ironweed" on stage at Capital Repertory Theatre in Albany on Wednesday evening at the conclusion of a marathon public performance. Scores of readers signed up to read passages during the event, which began at the nearby Albany Distilling Co. Bar & Bottle Shop.
One of Bernie Kolenberg's photographs from "The Shadow World." Buddy is in the center. (Courtesy William Kennedy)
"The Shadow World," a four-part series looking at "Albany's skid row," ran in four installments in 1964.
“Who cares about bums, especially bums in Albany?”
That’s how William Kennedy once summed up the response to his notion of producing a nonfiction book out of “The Secret World,” a four-part series on “Albany’s skid row” that he and photographer Bernie Kolenberg initially wrote for this newspaper in 1964. The two men had gotten close to the denizens of the city’s lower depths — the flophouses, soup kitchens and weed-choked fields where the homeless slept in decrepit cars — and thought their lives were worth chronicling. The series was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, but didn't win.
Last Saturday at my wife’s suggestion, I went in search of a digital version of the series and rather laboriously copied the third........
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