At 97, the Bard of Albany Still Spins Tales of Gangsters and Politicians

He walked into this Albany bar like he owned the joint, dressed to kill in a black overcoat with room enough for a Tommy gun. But all he was packing was his weapon of choice, a book.

The crowd met him at the door with a blast of cheers. There he is, they called out. There he is. William Kennedy. Bill.

Kennedy may be nearly 98 and using a walker, but don’t kid yourself. He knows where the bodies are buried — he still speaks to them — and he can drink you under the table. He is Albany’s ageless bard, and his appearance had just consecrated the rain-slickened night.

The occasion was a marathon reading of his novel “Legs,” about the dapper gangster Jack Diamond, who died in an Albany rooming house in 1931 from lead poisoning, brought on by three bullets to the head. The anointed venue was the ADCo Bar & Bottle Shop, an establishment of spirits, snug between the brick remnants of the old National Biscuit Co. bakery.

He is still jotting notes into small notebooks. He is still dressed to the nines. He is still writing fiction. And he is still being celebrated, most recently by the Library of America, which will be publishing a volume in the spring that includes three of his Albany novels (“Legs,” “Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game” and “Ironweed”) with a foreword by the novelist Colum McCann, who called Kennedy’s eight-novel Albany Cycle “among the most exuberant literary feats of the past half-century.” He joins a handful of other literary giants — Bellow, Didion and DeLillo, among them — to be so honored while still upright.

Sporting a sharp brown sport coat and a yellow tie with a touch of pizazz, Kennedy settled in. Volunteers were taking turns reading aloud from the sacred “Legs” text in an adjacent room, and he would soon take his turn at the lectern. But first, a glass of red, while people leaned in to share stories of thugs and pols and everyday characters — an Albany way of saying thank you.

Hours earlier, Kennedy was ensconced in a lounge chair at his rambling, 185-year-old home in an Albany suburb, thin and debonair, sipping wine and telling stories. The shelves and walls were chockablock with mementos from an extraordinary life that began before “Legs” Diamond was shot. A poster for the 1987 movie “Ironweed,” starring Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep. A portrait of a glowering Dan O’Connell, longtime boss of Albany’s Democratic machine and inspiration for Kennedy’s cleareyed political novel, “Roscoe.” An old Royal typewriter, evoking his long first career as a journalist in Puerto Rico, Miami and, mostly, Albany.

And photo after photo of Dana Kennedy, his wife of 66 years, who died in 2023. A professional dancer, she pirouetted into his life, raised three children with him and taught dance to keep insolvency at bay, as he embarked on the uncertain path of a novelist plumbing the past, Albany’s and his own.

That path had led to one of the most startling openings of any American novel. “Ironweed,” Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1983 masterpiece, follows the Depression-era Albany ramblings of Francis Phelan, a former baseball player who hit the skids after accidentally dropping and killing his infant son — and who communes with the ghosts of his past. Wandering into Saint Agnes Cemetery, Phelan spots his dead father, lighting his pipe to smoke “roots of grass that died in the periodic droughts afflicting the cemetery,” while his dead mother weaves crosses “from the dead dandelions and other deep-rooted weeds.”

Kennedy is proud of his canon. But as he reclined in his chair, he talked mostly about his life, often with astonishing recall. The boyhood haircut that made him look like a miniature George Raft. The names of friends who sang with him in a Knights of Columbus choir. The long-gone diners and nightclubs that catered to “swells, sports and bums.”

Referring to the Democratic dominance on the recent Election Day, for example, he remembered his mother on the morning after a long-ago presidential election: “Roosevelt was running against Landon in ’36. She woke me up and said, ‘Wake up! We won everything!’”

He said he knows the lyrics to hundreds of songs: Irish ballads and American standards and forgotten novelties. His father, a World War I veteran who later kept the books for a gambling operation, occasionally sang a song from that war called “Arrah Go On, I’m Gonna Go Back to Oregon,” and now here was his 97-year-old son, singing it too:

Arrah go on, I’m gonna go back to Oregon

Arrah go on, I’m gonna go back to stay

I could buy the horses many a bale of hay

For all that I’d have to pay to feed a chicken on old Broadway

Arrah go on, there’s somebody back in Oregon

The phone rang, loud enough to wake the dead. It was his older daughter, Dana Nelson, checking in. After they were finished catching up, he ended the call with, “I’ll see you all of a sudden, kid. Bye-bye.”

Wine finished, time to go. He paused to scan a few passages from “Legs,” put the paperback in his blazer pocket and headed to a waiting car.

As the suburban darkness yielded to the lights of Albany, Kennedy took in his city, an impressionistic blur through the rain-splattered window. His relationship to Albany is often compared to that of Joyce’s with Dublin. But Joyce left, never to return. Kennedy left, came back and found the universe in a small capital city hard against the Hudson River.

“It’s been a mutual relationship,” said Suzanne Roberson, Kennedy’s longtime researcher and archivist. “The city celebrates him, and he’s just so generous of himself — maybe to a fault.”

The Kennedy imprint is everywhere, in book festivals, in historic preservation, in the concrete. One example: Four decades ago, Kennedy used part of a sizable MacArthur Foundation Fellowship award to establish the New York State Writers Institute at the University at Albany, attracting thousands of writers and transforming the city into a literary mecca.

“We’ve had the pantheon come through here, and it’s all because of Bill Kennedy,” said Paul Grondahl, the director of the writers institute and author of several books about Albany. “Everyone wants to hang with him.”

Turn here, Kennedy said, now turn here. And there we were, in front of the ADCo Bar, short for the Albany Distilling Company, which produces a line of Ironweed whiskeys. Waiting inside were academics and journalists, friends and admirers, and family. Among them: Peter Quinn, novelist; Terry Golway, historian; Patricia Fahy, New York state senator (Democrat, of course); Mike Conners, former county comptroller and champion of the Sacred Heart food pantry; and Kennedy’s son, Brendan, and younger daughter, Kathy Caruso. Stories were shared, alcohol sampled.

Outside, a haunted Francis Phelan or two trudged past the bar window, shoulders to the rain. Their fleeting appearances grounded Grondahl’s appeal to those gathered in the chapel-like space where the reading was taking place. Please be generous to the food pantry, he said. People are going hungry, including in Kennedy’s old North Albany neighborhood, just blocks from here.

Finally, it was the author’s turn. Kennedy settled behind the lectern, a bright light shining on the text, that glass of red close at hand. Reading into the hush, he was at first hesitant, but he soon became animated and assured, as if drawing strength from words he wrote a half-century ago. In an instant, the congregation was transported to some shadowed woods in the Catskills, where Jack Diamond was threatening to kill an old man named Streeter, whom he suspected of running a still in violation of Legs’ law. Where was that damned still, Diamond kept asking.

The old man opened his eyes, saucers of terror. He shook his head. Jack put the pistol between his eyes, held it there for seconds of silence. Then he let it fall away with a weariness. He stayed on his haunches in front of Streeter, just staring. Just staring and saying nothing …

Kennedy finished reading the tense, violent, funny scene and looked up, his Irish mug aglow in the lamplight. “That’s it,” he said.

“Keep going!” the people of Albany called out. “Keep going!”

And so he did.