We find Francis Phelan in Great Depression-era Albany, being paid to cover some new graves -- a job he found to pay off the estranged son who last bailed him out of jail. Francis realizes that his parents are buried there, along with his infant son whose death was Francis' fault, and as he hallucinates that the dead people in the cemetery are singling him out for that long-ago death, he leaves the job and starts to drink again. A subsequent series of hallucinations and flashbacks takes Francis back through time in which he was a promising professional baseball player and a father, before guilt over his son's death and the strikebreaker he killed with a rock drove him away from them.
This book took me straight into the way an alcoholic like Francis justifies continuing to drink even when all signs are pointing to "stop drinking." What passes for lucidity from Francis is his internal reasoning that life as a bum (the book's preferred word) really isn't so bad; there are always flophouses and campfires under bridges, and someone with enough money to buy alcohol, although outside of his head the level of "not so bad" looks pretty terrible. For instance, Francis reunites briefly with Helen, his partner in self-destruction ("girlfriend" or "lover" just seems too joyful for their actual relationship) who has a little money with which to get a room for the night, but when they get robbed on the road he leaves her with another bum he knows who has a car. Francis' logic says, "Helen will be safe here with this guy who has a car she can sleep in, so she doesn't freeze to death," but he knows (as Helen later confirms) that the shelter will come at the price of Helen having sex with the car's owner. That Francis is fine with this tradeoff is worse than the tradeoff itself. This type of backward logic makes him unsympathetic, even through his non-self-inflicted troubles.
This book is right next to TOBACCO ROAD on the Modern Library list and they share similarities of economic straits, but while the sharecroppers of Tobacco Road are more or less tied to the land till death, Francis has options -- which makes his delinquency even more frustrating. He finds jobs, but he can't keep them because they interfere with his drinking; truly, it's the only thing that he loves. Even when it's revealed that (spoiler) Francis' wife still lives in Albany and would love to have him move back home, to be well-fed and well-rested, we know that he won't stay. It wears the reader down, but at the same time it's easy to understand why his son would just want to give up on him.
Knowing before I started that it took place among alcoholics during the Depression, I hadn't expected IRONWEED to be some kind of happy hobo story, but I didn't think it would be quite so effectively depressing. I read that this is just one book in Kennedy's trilogy about Depression-era Albany, without a consensus as to which of the three books are the best (the other two being LEGS and BILLY PHELAN'S GREATEST GAME), although IRONWEED won the Pulitzer. There's also a movie I am not likely to sit through featuring Jack Nicholson as Francis and Meryl Streep as Helen, plus Tom Waits (no, really) as one of Francis' bum friends.
Next up: I'm still reading FROM HERE TO ETERNITY, very slowly. I feel guilty about wanting the war to start so it will get more interesting.
And here's a pretty picture of Ironweed, the flower (Vernonia gigantea), via Growin' Wild.
No comments:
Post a Comment