"Nobody's a Bum All Their Life": Teaching Class Through William Kennedy's Ironweed

When Francis Phelan returns to Albany, New York, in 1938, after twenty-two years on the bum, he finds work in Saint Agnes Cemetery. Riding in the back of a rattling old truck, looking out at the monuments, cenotaphs, and grave stones, he observes that "the dead, even more than the living, settle down in neighborhoods" (1). Divided by symbols of material wealth, the cemetery reflects the socio-economic status of the dead and maintains eternally their place in society. But as Francis also suggests, class-based boundaries among the living are unstable. He should know. Once a member of Albany's solid working class and a revered professional baseball player, Francis now belongs to the maligned underclass, the class of alleged bums, hobos, and ne'er-do-wells. His fall from social respectability reveals the underbelly of the American Dream and marks Ironweedas a novel committed to interrogating class struggle in America. Through Francis's story, the novel imagines how class warfare has marginalized a community of talented people and limited the possibilities of its members. When, standing over the dying Alaskan prostitute, Sandra, whose body has been ravished by poverty, booze, and angry men, and remarking to Rudy that "Nobody's a bum all their life," Francis speaks to how these possibilities have been crushed by conditions of cultural hegemony, unscrupulous labor practices, and police brutality.

Most of the students who read William Kennedy's Ironweedin my sophomore level Political Novel course at Emmanuel College, however, privileged Francis' personal story over the class-based commentary the novel makes through it. In fact, given the novel's poetic exploration of the human condition, many of them expressed skepticism that Ironweedqualified as a political novel. As members of the white middle-class (for the most part), who have been educated in adequately funded public and private high schools, they had come to know the political novel through Sinclair, Orwell, and Huxley. ¹Stories that focused on personal tragedy, such as Ironweed, reflected the great classical ideas found in the Greeks and Shakespeare. These ideas transcended politics as they explored the universal qualities of humanity. To characterize the novel as political, my students said, would deny it the very features that made it worth reading.

That my students placed Ironweedwithin the humanist tradition spoke to some of the challenges of teaching the novel. I had chosen it for two primary reasons: its plot offers a subtle account of class warfare during the early part of the twentieth century and it reflects some of the historical conditions under which Kennedy wrote it. But the latter characteristics of the novel can complicate the former. Ironweedis a postwar protest novel that at once embraces and breaks from the aesthetic traditions of its prewar predecessors. Like other socially conscious novels of the late postwar period, Ironweedsometimes struggles against its own political priorities. Kennedy, for example, renders the effects of violent street life on Francis and Helen through their psychological experiences. This approach stresses the interior costs of homelessness. But it also reveals a postwar anxiety about the limitations of social realism. Kennedy seems deeply suspicious of the alleged sentimental naiveté of protest writers like John Steinbeck. The ambiguities and contradictions of the internal moral lives of Kennedy's characters reflect a complicated and varied relationship to the devastating forces of capitalism. This representation can pull readers away from the novel's larger concerns about capitalist exploitation and situate them within the experience of the individual. As a result, to those trained to read from a humanist perspective, like most of my students, Francis and Helen appear to suffer under circumstances brought on mostly by their own doing.

However, a brief examination of the history the novel covers as well as the history it contains not only reveals the source of Ironweed'shumanist seductions but also demonstrates how the novel is itself the site of class struggle. Written during the late 1970s and early 1980s— a time of stagnant wages, high unemployment, a debilitating oil crisis, and failed and...