Novelist shares recollections of growing up in North Albany as part of the church's 150th anniversary celebration
North Albany is a central character in William Kennedy's Pulitzer-winning novel Ironweed, and the Sacred Heart of Jesus Church is at its center.
Kennedy, born in North Albany and baptized at Sacred Heart, shared his memories of the church and the neighborhood during a talk on Sunday, August 11, part of the church's 150 anniversary celebration.
How essential is Albany, this sense of place -- and Irish Catholicism -- to Kennedy's characters? In an essay titled "Francis Phelan in Purgatory: William Kennedy's Catholic Imagination in Ironweed," published in the journal Christianity and Literature in 2004, Brennan O'Donnell wrote:
A cradle Catholic born in 1928, William Kennedy says that he ceased long ago to "give allegiance to the Church in any formal or ritualistic way." When asked by interviewers about the influence of his Catholic upbringing and education on his work, however, he goes a long way toward suggesting that much of what is distinctive in his worldview and his approach to fiction has been shaped definitively by his Irish-Catholic heritage. In an interview with Rudy Nelson, published in Image in 1994, he says that his religious education gave him the "substructure" of his life, "a way of engaging the world," and he talks frequently throughout the published interviews about the ways in which Catholic doctrine, images, cultural practices, and habits of mind have "gotten into my imagination and my language."
While he doesn't "look at it in the way [he] used to when [he] was a kid," he tells another interviewer, he believes that Catholic theology has "great humanistic dimensions, great wisdom about how to achieve peace of mind in relationship to the unknown, the infinite. Maybe iťs a palliative [...]. At the same time, it's beautiful. It's as good as I see on the horizon. I don't need Buddhism, or Zoroastrianism - I've got the Sacred Heart Church in North Albany."
Kennedy's keen, not to say obsessive, interest in rendering the particularities of historical Albany - especially of Irish-Catholic Albany between 1850 and 1960 - makes attention to the role of the Church in the lives of his characters supremely important.
A writer who wants to bring to life the world and worldview of such characters cannot but be attentive to the presence of the Church, the influence of which historically has pervaded the domestic, social, and political lives of Albanians. Kennedy somewhat paradoxically connects this interest in novelistic verisimilitude with his famously mixed style, in which lyric flights of "magic" (a favorite word), fantasy, and surrealism are wont to break out in the midst of even the most starkly realistic or stylistically mundane passages: there must be, he says, a surreal dimension in "any society in which religion plays such a dominant role."
Remarks, Sacred Heart Church 150th Anniversary
By William Kennedy
August 11, 2024
I must warn you that these remarks aren’t a sermon to improve your behavior, nor are they autobiographical. I have no credentials to tell anybody how to behave, or how to vote in the next election, KA-ma-la.
Some members of my family go to church, some don’t. That’s the way it’s been for many years, but I believe they all identify as Catholic. I remember what James Joyce said about the church -- that if it gets to you when you’re young, it’s got you forever.
That’s how it’s been with me. I’m nothing at all like the very devout young Catholic I was when I was eight – I was an Altar boy. I am now a very, very great distance from that condition. But the church -- even this particular Sacred Heart Church that we’re in right now -- is scattered through the early pages of the novel I’m now writing about North Albany – Limerick – 88 years after that early devoutness.
The church has been a major presence in other books I’ve written, and its dogma, rituals, codes of behavior, and formidable history continue to influence my values and moral decisions the way all my schools influenced me, and my parents, and my two years in the army, and the great journalists whose work I studied, and the great writers whose literature took me by the throat and squoze me into the shape of a novelist.
Having a particular religion in your brain as an intellectual foundation is also useful when you confront such challenges as Vishnu, Allah, Krishna, Wakan Tanka*, the Tao, and so many others.
Anyway, here I am after a lifetime away. I left Albany – and Limerick – and Sacred Heart in 1956 and created a new journalistic life in Puerto Rico and Miami. I was there seven years until family matters brought me back here in 1963.
Today I’ve brought with me a rare thing to share with you -- a poster-photograph that presents a vision of Sacred Heart Church and a portrait of an entire generation of 14-or so-year-old North Albany Catholic boys and girls born in the mid-1920s.
It’s 1936, and these kids have just received the sacrament of Confirmation in our church from Edmund F. Gibbons, who was Bishop of Albany from 1919 to 1954, and who is seated front row center. The kids are standing on the church’s 14 steps for their generational portrait.
I don’t know where I got this poster. Since I wrote O Albany! people give me all sorts of memorabilia. But this grabbed me. I tacked it to a door in my office and it stayed there maybe 20 or 30 years. I knew so many of the kids in it, and the two priests, and the Bishop.
It’s a portrait of the Sacrament of Confirmation in 1936, and the kids in it are about 14, but they’re not all that age. The Church in my day said you should be confirmed when you reach the Age of Discretion. What did that mean? The church was vague. I looked up their definition and it said that it’s “when you are capable of being morally responsible for your actions." They never mention puberty, but I think that’s what they meant; which is when you’ve developed the equipment to be morally irresponsible.
Also, some kids were laggardly in getting confirmed, some never bothered, and it certainly didn’t have the same impact as that first sacrament we all received, Baptism, when we got naked and were splashed with cold water.
In 1956 I left Albany and went to San Juan and Miami and when I came back in 1963 all the priests of 1936 were gone, Father John O’Connor and Father Edward Daley, and my favorite priest of all time, John J. Feary. The new pastor was Father John Gaffigan, from Troy, who had made major changes in Sacred Heart. I don’t know why it changed, but since 1929 North Albany kids were taught catechism by the Sisters of St. Joseph, who were quartered at Catholic High School in Troy.
In 1950 Father Gaffigan brought in the Sisters of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary as residents of the parish, and they were teaching catechism. Before long he built a convent for the nuns, and then a school where they taught -- life-changing developments for the parish. I was impressed but I wasn’t connected to the church.
It wasn’t until 1972 that I reconnected through Father John Rooney, the new pastor. I can’t remember how we met, but he was a great guy and came to our house to visit. I was broke, as usual, looking for solitude -- to write my novel.
Our house was so busy I was frazzled. Two small daughters, a year-old son, my wife’s endless students taking dance lessons in our family room, and the phone ringing every six minutes -- I had quit full-time journalism to be a full-time writer. What I needed was a getaway to make money. If I delivered 100 pages of my second novel, Legs, to the Dial Press, my editors would pay me a thousand dollars, a small fortune in 1971.
Father Rooney suggested I go up to Camp Tekakwitha on Lake Luzerne in the Adirondacks, the Catholic Diocese’s closed-down summer boys’ camp. My mother went there when she was 15, about 1912, when it was a girls’ camp. Father Rooney, was in charge of it so I went for two weeks in October, 1971. My wife Dana and the kids came for a weekend, but the other days I was alone and wrote constantly.
The temperature went down to 30 degrees and I ran out of kerosene for the heater, but when I finished writing for the day I wrapped myself in all my clothes, muffler and gloves, sipped Old Crow for several hours, sat in a rocker and attacked Joyce’s impenetrable novel, Finnegans Wake. I read through the Anna Livia Plurabelle finale until I cried. But I got up and wrote the next day and every day, all day, those two weeks, finished the 100 pages, and got the thousand big ones.
So you might say that the church kept me alive to finish that book, Legs, and then write six more novels. I wouldn’t argue with that, though other interventions helped keep me sane and solvent until I published Legs in 1975. I am enormously grateful to the forces responsible -- family, old friends from the army and the newspaper, The University at Albany, a federal arts grant, and the church -- they all made it happen.
Now, let me show you this rare photo of our very notable generation of North Albany kids who were confirmed on this memorable day in 1936 and went off to change the world. I recognize about 21 of the kids, but I’m iffy about some. Here we go. Start at the bottom left corner and I’ll lead you upward and sideward as necessary with may laser pointer. At the extreme bottom left is
Gussy O’Donnell – who lived on Walter Street, and next to him (left) is
Donald Langley, (I think) It looks very like Don but he seems a bit young for this crowd) Don was a star tenor in the church choir, and my first neighbor at 620 No Pearl St. in 1933 and lifelong friend. Behind Don’s right ear you’ll see
Joe Metzger, who led a swing band in the early ‘40s. He was older than I was, but we went through high school and college together and he played a sweet trumpet and did a marvelous emulation of Billy Butterfield’s solo on Artie Shaw’s "Stardust" when his band played for our dances. Joe’s left ear is touching a fellow whose hands are clasped and this is
Jimsy Burns, one of North Albany’s noted eccentrics; and I don’t have time to elaborate what gave him that reputation. Count two boys directly to Jimsy’s left, then dip down left into to the row below him and find light haired young man with his chin up and that’s
George Haggerty from Walter Street. George played baseball with us once in a while in the field behind School 20. Directly to his left is
Edmund (Teddy) Flint, whom I knew from the fifth or sixth grade and became like a bother to me, a cop who rose to be a detective lieutenant, and our close friendship lasted till he died. He went into the Priesthood after high school, as did a few others in this photo, including two who could be here, but I can’t find their yesterday faces -- Jackie Barnes and Red (Rusty) Robinson. Teddy did a few years in the seminary, then left and joined the army. I don’t remember his ears sticking out as much as they do in this photo. He was a handsome dude and should have been more than a cop, but I think the priesthood stunted his secular education. He had a streak of brilliance in him and he talked like a cardiologist and a neurosurgeon combined. Directly below Teddy’s left ear is
Butch McCabe. Can’t remember his first name, but he had brothers and I remember them living on the same (or next) street as Teddy. I think we played ball, hung out. Move upward from the top of Butch’s head two row and there is
Bobby Burns, one of my great childhood pals, a redhead, like me, witty, smart, and who could have had a career as an artist – a cartoonist, a painter -- but he never gave himself the chance. He lived a good life, married a beauty, Betty Logan of Walter Street, who I think is in this portrait and I see her twice, but I’m not sure of either, and they raised great kids. Immediately above Bob’s left ear is (I think)
Willie Ray. We called Willie Willie, but sometimes we called him Mallet-Head, because his high forehead exacerbated his large skull. He was a funny guy, always laughing, with a zaftig sister and a younger brother who was wounded badly in an auto accident in later years. Willie’s cruel nickname endured, but we softened it by just calling him Mallet. Now go up a couple of rows where I know almost nobody. Go to the young women in white veils, count three veils in from the left, and that is
Jacqueline Dunn, known as Jackie, but it may not be her. Don’t sue me. She’s a bit young, but if it isn’t her, it’s somebody Jackie will look like next year at the 1937 confirmation. Now count two male heads straight down and then one left and that’s
Roy VanAmberg of the notable North Albany Dutch family, and whose cousin was Bill VanAmberg, Albany’s Deputy Police Chief, who managed the famous Night Squad which kept watch over Albany’s nighttown in the 1960s. He and I met a couple of times in the South End Tavern in Troy in the early ‘80s with Ronie Campion, the North End Undertaker and County Coroner (those 2 jobs went together) to talk about -- what else -- North Albany. Okay, follow a straight line from Roy’s head upward and you’ll discover
Father Edward Daley, the tall, thin assistant pastor of Sacred Heart in the mid and late 1930s. He gave witty sermons, unlike the boring gloom of our pastor, Father John O’Connor, who is standing to the immediate left of Father Daley and who didn’t have a witty bone in his head. Father Daley was hyping love and marriage to us all from the pulpit and he sang us a very popular hit song from 1924, "Tea for Two" – you know it ‘Tea for two and two for tea and me for you and you for me …’ The song had a resurgence in 1939 when Art Tatum recorded it, and that was when Father Daley from the pulpit sang a few of its lyrics to prove how inane current pop music about love and marriage was. This is what he sang:
Day will break and you'll awake
And start to bake a sugar cake
For me to take
To all the boys to see
I think he got a standing ovation. Now move left past Father O’Connor, about whom we’ll hear more later, and to his left is
Tommy (Bosco) Kennedy, though it doesn’t look like the Tommy whom I knew all our life. But we all transmogrify. Tommy went through School 20, got the message from Sacred Heart’s priests and nuns, and became a Christian Brother (the Brothers also taught my father and me, different schools.) Now, go down two heads from Tommy’s left ear. Find a small young altar boy with a healthy crop of dark (auburn) hair, parted on his left side. That’s
Me. I was eight and never knew I was there till I studied it maybe five years ago. I had a face like that, and hair like that, parted on the left. I don’t remember this Confirmation, but it’s me, plus nine other altar boys along the top, with four older altar boys carrying crosses. Now follow a line from my left ear upward and you’ll encounter
Mike Kennedy, Bosco’s brother, also John’s brother. Mike and John both became (Redemptorist) priests after they graduated from North Albany (and don’t forget Bosco, a Christian Brother: a triple play for Sacred Heart.) We were great neighbors all our life. John became a missionary in Latin America, and one day playing football behind School 20 I watched Mike throw a football nine miles.
In my very earliest altar-boy days, I served Mass for Mike when he was enough of a priest to say Mass at a side altar in Sacred Heart. Altar boys offer two cruets -- of wine and water -- to the priest during the mass, and I picked up the cruets but didn’t know what to do with them. Mike helped me, pointed to his outstretched fingers, on which I was supposed to pour water for him to wash, but his fingers also pointed to the floor, so I put the cruets on the floor. Mike laughed and corrected me and I finally got it right. A friend later told me that this was the funniest Mass he’d ever been to.
When I was in the Army during Korea I went to Ireland with no Kennedy relatives of my own to look up, so I looked up the Kennedy clan’s relatives in Cashel, Tipperary, and they introduced me to Irish whiskey neat in front of the fireplace at their small hotel near the Rock of Cashel, for which I have been ever grateful.
Now we move down through this bevy of beautiful children and we come to the bottom corner where a girl is looking at the camera, but at something far more interesting to her left, and this is
Marie Gallo, who lived a block away from me and whom I knew casually and find memorable. Directly behind her right elbow in the second row is another incarnation of Jackie Dunn. And to her right might, just might, be Betty Logan, who you’ll remember married Bobby Burns. Now to the boys, follow a direct line up from Marie Gallo’s scalp and you come to, I think,
Joey Russo, at least it looks like Joey, who lived about a block from me on Lawn Avenue , which we called Lawn Street, and I seem to remember him owning a horse, which none of us did. Now go from Joey’s left ear upward to his half-left ,and find a boy with a shock of hair that is comparable to what I had to deal with a few years later, and you’ll see
Joe Duclos, whose Mother gave me a photo of baseball players in Chadwick Park, Menands, about 1900l and which I used to great advantage in my novel Ironweed, with Francis Phelan, my protagonist, playing a significant role in the moment that the photo captured. For that I’m grateful. Early on, writing this, I thought this boy might be Joe, but wasn’t sure till his son or nephew identified him after my speech. So, hello, Joe, great to see you again and have you back with us. Now, we move two heads left from Joe’s left ear, go down three heads to the smiliest face you can find, and there’s
Lou Pitnell, one of my best buddies from our family’s first days in North Albany in 1932 or was it 1933? Lou and his sister Jean lived directly across the street with their mother Mary Dunn, and their father, also Lou, who ran the busiest barber shop in North Albany across from the trolley barns on Broadway. Lou Jr. and I were great pals for life, went to high school and some college together. Lou went into the priesthood with Teddy, and they left it about the same time. Lou got his master’s degree and became a high-school English teacher. Great guy.
Not in the picture and I don’t know why, is Father John J. Feary, He was a sanctified, compassionate man, a truly saintly priest like none other I ever knew and I knew a lot of them. He was revered as a saint by everybody who ever mentioned his name. He spent his days comforting the ailing, helping the troubled, consoling the dying. He created basketball, football and baseball leagues for the small kids, and also the smaller kids who couldn’t qualify for the Little Leagues. Everybody went to confession to him – I wrote this about him years ago: “You’d been sinning like a maniac – robbing blind people, kicking cripples, eating hamburgers on Friday, coveting half a dozen of your neighbor’s wives and daughters, going to movies listed as “Objectionable in Part” by the Evangelist, the Albany Diocesan newspaper which published a no-no list weekly. You’d tell all this to Father Feary and he says, “Ah, well, now be a good boy, and for your penance say three Hail Mary’s and a good Act of Contrition.”
Contrarily, if you went to confession to Father O’Connor – I rarely did – he’d bark at you, and say “Cut that stuff out and buy a 20 pound cross, and carry it up and down in front of the church two hours a day for ten days.” Well -- maybe he wasn’t that severe, but he wasn’t anything like Father Feary.
Which reminds me of the priest in the Lithuanian Church on Livingston Avenue in Arbor Hill to whom the women in my family often went to confession because he didn’t understand English.
Okay. Enough.
* The Great Mystery, The Divine, in Lakota, (Native American, Sioux)
Comments