Four decades of writers talking about writing
William Kennedy reflects on Writers Institute’s anniversary
FThis speech was delivered at the state University at Albany by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Ironweed” on Jan. 19 at an event marking the 40th anniversary of the New York State Writers Institute, and Kennedy’s 95th birthday. It has been edited for length. orty years. That used to be a long time — also it was an advanced age. In 1882 if you were 40 years old you were near death — that was our life expectancy in America. By 1932 life expectancy was up to 60, and that year a man named Walter Pitkin wrote a book called “Life Begins at 40,” which was a top bestseller for all of 1933 and ‘34. The book’s premise was that if you maintain the proper positive attitude you can live on and on and on — which, of course, is what we have maintained at the Writers Institute since we began celebrating writers and writing in 1983. Positive attitudes. “Life Begins at 40” became a movie, a hit song recorded by Sophie Tucker, also it became an optimistic bromide for the nation.
I began my life as a novelist in 1968 when I was 40. I’d been writing fiction since college, but the writer’s code forbids calling yourself a novelist if you haven’t published a novel. Then I published “The Ink Truck” with the Dial Press and ever after I called myself “novelist William Kennedy.” But I was still unknown, and always broke. I used to go to work on the newspaper with the only cash in my pocket being an emergency dime so I could call somebody from a pay phone and ask them to bring money.
Forty years ago this month I began life again as a novelist, when three of my novels — “Legs,” “Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game” and “Ironweed” — were published as a trilogy to a wave of improbable critical praise; and the very same week I received a MacArthur Fellowship worth more than a quarter of a million dollars over five years. Plus, I was given a nickname by Mario Cuomo: I walked into his office at the Capitol and he stood up and said, “Hey, here’s Bill ‘Big Bucks’ Kennedy.”
Then, with his signature and good will, plus hefty enthusiasm from two state legislators and the then-president of this university, Vince O’Leary, plus a chunk of MacArthur money I had access to, we started this thing called the Writers Institute in my colleague Tom Smith’s cubbyhole office on the third floor of the English Department with an ex-student of mine, Jeanne Finley, as our assistant and impromptu accountant. Our desks spilled out into the hallway. But we took off like a rocket with our first two events: Saul Bellow and Toni Morrison, who both packed the ballroom with a thousand people. The years moved ahead and we went through tough days — tight money everywhere, everybody’s budget got slashed. But we carried on, bringing major writers of the world to Albany. We also spread our wings, moving into the community with our programs featuring every kind of writer: August Wilson, Stephen Sondheim, Maurice Sendak, Nadine Gordimer, Norman Mailer, Seamus Heaney, Spike Lee, Hunter Thompson, Harold Bloom, Steven Pinker, Margaret Atwood.
But tonight, as we turn 40, here we
It was invaluable what I learned from interviewing other writers about their books and careers when I was a freelance journalist, and that experience was what I wanted to recapitulate for our students when they got to talk personally with our visiting writers.
are rich — believe it: a million bucks from Chet and Karen Opalka, two people in my home neighborhood who revere literature and the arts and who like what we do at the Writers Institute. This is a major development in our history.
We are doing marvelous things at the Institute these days — some we always wanted to do but couldn’t, and some we never thought of doing until we gathered our talented current staff. Our website is a bustling, varied place with our fantastic archive of 2,500 visiting writers, some of which is on YouTube, plus our Trolley magazine of essays, stories, poems, plus our annual book and film festivals, plus our selection of juries every two years to choose a New York State Author and State Poet, and more. Our staff, as my mother used to say, is busier than a red-assed bee.
We’re also in the midst of a media revolution, newspapers and magazines falling away like the leaves, and the internet and its exotic inhabitants are taking us god knows where. But one thing hasn’t changed, and that’s writing. Writers still sit down with pen and ink, as Sophocles did, or with a keyboard, as Hemingway did, and they ransack their brains to find some new story to tell.
I have two new stories.
In the late 1980s, I was on a European book tour with my novels and two London literary journalists ganged up on me over lunch about the Writers Institute, which they mocked for its plan to “teach writing.” Such behavior did not exist in England was their tone — we know better, you can’t teach writing. I knew that, and we weren’t teaching writing at the Institute; we were delivering literature and movies and theater to our aspiring students, from people who had made that lit, those movies, those plays, and delivering it also to our hungry audiences who wanted to know more about those creative people and their works. We had visiting writers in residence who taught classes in poetry and fiction, but we never offered a how-to course — “How to Become a Novelist in Six Easy Lessons” — which is the type of course those knuckleheaded Brits were mocking. We had some terrific British writers come to the Institute very early on — Allan Sillitoe, Kazuo Ishiguro, Julian Barnes and more — who delivered us some great literature and were not asked to teach anybody how to write anything.
Inventing stories — trying to hear the music, creating something out of nothing and having it be worth reading or watching — is immensely difficult. It requires solitude, meditation, time, and the discovery of the self, which is the secret of every book. It took me six years to write my second novel, “Legs,” and I thought I’d learned how to write the novel; but I hadn’t. The more I learned about it the more difficult it became, putting something on the page that would not erase itself as worthless by tomorrow morning.
It was invaluable what I learned from interviewing other writers about their books and careers when I was a freelance journalist, and that experience was what I wanted to recapitulate for our students when they got to talk personally with our visiting writers.
Anyway, I had another lunch experience on my European book tour — when I left London and went to Ireland. My wife, Dana, and I walked into a pub, and we of course ordered a Guinness. The barman said he was sorry, but the pub was closed for the afternoon, by law, and would reopen in about an hour. “But,” he said, “you can do a bit of shopping down the street and come back, or you can just sit at one of our tables and wait until we reopen.”
I said we’d wait, and so we went and sat at a table. And the barman came over and asked us, “Would you like to have a drink while you’re waiting?”