J. A. Perles.— When did you discover that you wanted to be a professional writer?

    W. Kennedy.— Well, I always wanted to be a newspaper writer and I also wanted to write fiction for magazines; short stories, because I knew some newspaper men who did that and it seemed like a good thing to do when I was getting out of high school. It seemed an interesting way to live. In college I did both. I became a journalist at school and was the editor of the school newspaper. I also wrote short stories for the school magazine.

    In the three or four years after college I continued to pursue journalism very vigorously but I became more and more interested in serious literature and I read a great deal and began to write short stories of a different kind from when I was at college. These were meant to be serious short stories but they were not. I meant them to be but they were inferior works, it was an apprentice work I was just beginning, trying to understand what to do, so then I pursued that, I kept writing, I wrote around thirty short stories and some of them were okay, well... not bad, although nothing I would want to publish now.

    When I went to Puerto Rico I stopped working as a full time journalist because I realized that the only way I was really going to become a serious writer was to stop being a serious journalist. I gave full time or as much time as I could possibly do to being a novelist and short story writer. I wrote two novels down in Puerto Rico and neither one of them was ever published. I also wrote several short stories, around half a dozen, I don’t remember exactly how many now. Years after that I kept writing and kept writing and I continued to work in journalism. It was years before I could leave it entirely, as I always had to make money and as a journalist I could make money. I had family by that time. I had two children in Puerto Rico. I came back to Albany and when I was in Albany I published a few short stories. Then I sold a novel, my first novel. It was called The Ink Truck.

    So, to answer your question, it was an evolutionary thing. The idea was there at the beginning but I had to move through apprenticeship. I had to move out of the idea of writing as a popular fiction writer. I was not interested in that anymore and I did not know how long it would take to become a serious writer. It takes a very long time sometimes.

    J. A. Perles.— Do you think it was easier for you as you were already a reputed journalist?

    W. Kennedy.— Well to a certain degree it impeded me, it stopped me because I had to work. I had to take so much time away from writing seriously and also I had to discover the difference between writing for journalistic newspapers and magazines and writing serious fiction. It took a while, but it was also great training ground and it got me into places, to see people, to be in situations, to learn about the world in ways that I might never have learned had I not been in the newspaper business.

    J. A. Perles.— What does Saul Bellow mean to you now and what did he mean to you when you were starting your career as a novel writer?

    W. Kennedy.— I just knew about Saul Bellow and I knew he was a very good writer. When I was in Puerto Rico I was an editor of a newspaper and we carried a story in the paper that he was coming to the University of Puerto Rico to teach a course in writing and he was accepting manuscripts from people who might want to enter into his course. I sent the manuscript of the novel I was working on and he liked it. He accepted me as a student. So over all the semester I worked with him. Every two or three weeks we would get together at the faculty club and he either had read what I had given him or he would read it there. Then he would react to me and then we would talk for an hour or so. He was very critical and very supportive. Sometimes he did not like what he had read and then he told me why and I changed everything. I would write a new section, bring it back and he liked it enormously. He could not believe that it had made that transition, and when he said my work was publishable I felt so good I went out and bought a bottle of champagne! Nobody had ever told me that anything that I had written was publishable, especially nobody at that level of literature. I studied with him for one semester, and then in later years, when I went back to Albany, as a journalist I did a couple of interviews with him because he lived not too far away from where I was and he was very supportive. I sent him a book at one point, a book that was never published, and he liked it. I just found the letter again fairly recently. I had forgotten about it, but his support for the book did not help as the book still did not get published. So I went on through the years, just reading whatever he did and we became friends. I spoke to him just before we came back, he was very ill but he is now much better. He has got a good book and is working on a new novel. He has a new short story coming out in Esquire this year. He is almost eighty years old and I think he is the grand old man of American letters. He is a marvellous man and very generous with younger writers. I think he always said that I was the last writing course he ever taught. He still teaches literature at Boston University. He is a brilliant scholar as well as being a terrific writer and he has a wonderful knowledge of literature.

    J. A. Perles.— Why write so much about Albany? The city appears as a Platonic Demiurge. Why did you choose to give it such an impressive quality in your novel writing if the real Albany is so provincial?

    W. Kennedy.— But it is not really so provincial. For me it is a most significant city, both historically and literarily. It is the mother of Presidents of the United States. It is one of the great crossroads of American History for transportation, the Eire Canal. It was the way west for stage-coach rides out of Albany and it was the last port for ocean going vessels that could come up the river. There was a very early airline flight out of Albany to New York. The first centralized capitalistic corporation, the consolidation of all the railroads in New York State under the New York central system, took place in Albany headed by a man from Albany who was the richest man of the state at that time. It also was the home at one time or another of Henry James's family and Herman Melville's family. It has a very high level of cultural history. It is also the centre of immigration. It is as old as the United States. It goes back to the beginnings of the seventeenth century when Henry Hudson came up the river in 1609, the first decade of the seventeenth century. In the Revolutionary War, Albany was a very significant place and the battle of Saratoga was just a few miles away. The British general, General Burgoyne, came to Albany when he surrendered to the American troops. He was a prisoner there for the American army. It has a great history. It has created wonderful figures in American history such as Grover Cleveland, Teddy Roosevelt. At one point or other they have existed in Albany. In my new novel, I am writing about Grover Cleveland when he was the governor and how he becomes president during that time in 1884. So it is not a provincial city. It is small but very significant historically.

    W. Kennedy.— No, that is not why I did it. The first novel I wrote was set from the turn of the century to the 1960's. It spanned 60 years and it looked up the various members of the Phelan family and I began to see that it was a very interesting time because I understood it. That was the time I was born into. It was the time my parents lived. I have heard stories all my life about that period, and when I grew up as a newspaper man I began to see Albany as a city of very interesting crime. It was a very important city, again for transportation, during the prohibition era, because all the trains and the boats and the automobiles carrying illegal beer and booze came through Albany. It is the way you came from Canada down to New York to the Catskill Mountains and from there you went to Boston. There were a number of criminals around the city and it was very famous. Criminals like Diamond who became a notorious figure in Albany history. I grew up with that because I knew the newspaper men who had written about him when he was alive.

    J. A. Perles.— Has Ironweed been your most successful novel?

    W. Kennedy.— It depends on how you look at the success, I think that it is probably the best long novel.

    J. A. Perles.— So you consider it to be your best work?

    W. Kennedy.— I do not think that there is such a thing. I like it very much but I also like the book that I am working on right now. I like Very Old Bones very much. It is quite a different kind of novel. I loved Legs when I wrote it because it was so very hard to write and I learned how to write a novel. A number of people think that Billy Phelan's Greatest Game is my best novel. I get that all the time.

    Ironweed has been published in about 23 languages and countries. I liked it when I had finished it. I thought that it was my best novel at that time. I had done other things, Quinn's Book sold more copies. At a certain moment it became a best seller. Ironweed was never quite that kind of a best seller but ultimately it has sold many more copies than any other book so far. I guess I would have to say that it was the most successful book. Very Old Bones is another book, literarily very coherent, and the one I am looking at now The Flaming Corsage, I think they rank as the kind of work that Ironweed is.

    J. A. Perles.— Which of your works did you most enjoy writing?

    W. Kennedy.— I loved the Ink Truck because I was my breakthrough book and I had such a good time writing it .

    J. A. Perles.— Teachers and critics have a tendency to look for similarities among authors and their written work. For instance, in Ironweed Francis Phelan is visited and followed by ghosts. Where you influenced in any way by the use of the figure of the ghost as it has been used by Latin-American authors, Juan Rulfo, Alejo Carpentier or Gabriel García Márquez, for example?

    W. Kennedy.— No, I was not, I did not know those books in the days when I was writing Ironweed, I did not know Rulfo, I did not know Carpentier. I came to it through English literature, American literature and the playwright Tom Wilder in Out of Town. The ghost of the young woman who dies, she comes back and she walks through the house and she talks to the stage manager. I think that was a remarkable moment in literature. So are the ghosts in Dickens, in A Christmas Carol for instance, ghosts of Hamlet's father in Shakespeare. There are all kinds of ghosts in literature that have influenced me. I see that my books have now become labelled «Magic Realism» in the United States by some critics. Not all of the books, but all the novels have some element of that in them. Even my first novel, if you consider the trip he makes back in time. In Legs the ghostly scene at the end of the novel and in Billy Phelan's Greatest Game the visions that Martin Daugherty has.

    J. A. Perles.— Is there an implicit political protest in Ironweed of the way the homeless are treated and considered in the u.s.?

    W. Kennedy.— There was not any homeless problem to speak of when I was writing that book. I mean it was around in 1979 and 80 but it had not reached the proportions that it did in later years. By the time the book came out there was a homeless problem but three or four years earlier when I was beginning to write it, I had no thought of that. This was a character out of my first novel that was never published, it was called The Angels and the Sparrows. Francis Phelan was a character in there. I always liked him enormously, he just moved into Billy Phelan and then he moved on from there to his own book because I thought he deserved that. The homeless problem is something that if it intercepts with what I am doing, fine, but to write a novel about the homeless as an act of social protest is not why I write literature. I wrote a lot about homeless people, poor people, welfare people and people living in the slums when I was a journalist and that is a different kind of thing. I was an investigative reporter and I was an advocacy journalist. I was arguing on behalf of these people and in the novel this is implicit in the life of Francis. Whatever the criticism is, it can stand, I mean I do not disavow it, it is there, but it is not why I wrote the book.

    J. A. Perles.— Death is a constant subject in your books, but not only death, violence also plays an important part in them and it is not uncommon to find scatological details. Do your characters select your topics or is it the other way around, you select your characters because you want to develop those topics?

    W. Kennedy.— Yes, I liked Billy Phelan so much that I felt he deserved his own book and I had enough material on him and knew him well enough that I could write that book and so I did. In the life that he was living death was very common. Death is very common in all of our lives. One of my very best friends from childhood, one of my closest friends, was dying when I was leaving the city to come over here to Spain. Last year, last September one of my very closest friends in the world died, just like that. It has been death, death, death. It is a constant reminder of our own mortality. I read the obituary column every morning in my newspaper to see who is dead that morning. It is curious, but it is a fact of life. But I also write about family and love and loyalty and other things.

    J. A. Perles.— Are you a practising Catholic?

    W. Kennedy.— No, I was raised a Catholic.

    J. A. Perles.— In Spain Catholicism is taken for granted, but it is not in the u.k. or in the u.s. Do you think that your education as a catholic influenced your decision to became a creative writer and your literary work?

    W. Kennedy — In my life religion was taken for granted also. In my neighbourhood everybody was catholic. It was about 95% Catholic, 5% Protestant or some kind of other religion. I knew nothing about Protestantism when I was a child. I knew nothing about Jews and nothing about Moslems or Buddhists or anything else. Only Catholics, that is all I knew.

    J. A. Perles —All your novels have been translated into Spanish. Why do you think a Spanish reader would be interested in them?

    W. Kennedy.— I would think because the Spanish readers have excellent taste!

    J. A. Perles.— Was screenplay writing a negative or positive experience for you?

    W. Kennedy — It was great fun and has been a positive experience. I had a good time and I made money on it the first time I did it. I was broke and I was not making money on books and I wrote a script and it made money for me although it was never made into a movie. Later I wrote the script for «The Cotton Club» with Frances Ford Copolla and that was fun. I made some good money on that. That is one of the reasons you do this, because it is such a lucrative way of writing. It was always something I sort of did with my left hand. I do not think of myself as a career screenwriter. It is something that has happened to me in my life because of my interest in movies and I know a lot about writing dialogue and putting those together and it became something to do. After «The Cotton Club» I became known as a screenwriter and I got money for writing Billy Phelan's Greatest Game and Legs and Ironweed. Ironweed was made into a film and I had great fun with that, working with Hector Babenco. They shot the film in Albany and that was very pleasant. I enjoyed that very much.

    J. A. Perles.— Have you thought about converting a novel of another author into a screenplay?

    W. Kennedy.— Well, I am collaborating on a play with another author, with an established playwright by the name of Romulus Liny. He is in New York and he teaches in Columbia University and we were approached by a theatre in my city. They have always wanted me to write something for them, for the theatre. I do not know that much about theatre. I know a lot more now than I used to, but I did not know then and I was always reluctant to just say «okay you can go ahead and make something out of my books» because all the books were already under contract in one way or another for films and I just did not want to do it. But then they came along and said that they had a grant and if they could find somebody to work with me I would not have to worry about how to structure it and I agreed with that idea. I thought it could be fun and it has been. Last August we had a stage reading, a dramatic reading of it in Albany, and it went very well. But it was an unfinished work and now I am in the process of doing a rewrite on it. Then I will give it to my collaborator and he will edit whatever he thinks and we will put it on next spring about a year from now in Albany. It will be very good fun I think and I am enjoying it.

    J. A. Perles.— Does it help your writing being away from your country?

    W. Kennedy.— Well, sometimes it works that way I suppose. Although when you travel you eat so much that you do not have time to write! I am leading towards the end of the novel. I am about three quarters through. I have brought my notes with me and I keep reading them and selecting what seem to be the necessary ingredients for the last quarter of the book although I do not think I will do much writing. I will not get through all the notes, not on this trip. I never again want to separate myself for any length of time from the work I am pursuing as if I do, it is counterproductive. You have to go back and start over. You forget the connections, you forget all the relationships and it almost becomes like another book in a certain sense. I do not want that to happen.

    J. A. Perles.— What are you working on at the moment?

    W. Kennedy.— I am writing a new book called The Flaming Corsage which is a title of a play written by the main character of the book. His name is Edward Daugherty. This is all pre-figured in Billy Phelan's Greatest Game. It is the story of Edward's marriage to Katrina and a scandal that he becomes involved in at the turn of the century that ruins his life. Two people are killed and out of this rubble of life he creates what becomes his greatest play. He is a playwright and somewhat of a novelist. He writes this play and this is the story of how the play came to be, one of the events behind it, and how his marriage was central to the events.