"A Writer Still Unstopped" by Robert Stewart

A Writer Still unstopped

Robert Stewart Celebrating Thomas E. Kennedy, edited by Walter Cummins, Serving House Books, 2021.

I think of Thomas E. Kennedy as a true writer, apparently undaunted by any circumstance that might have tried to distract him, working in multiple forms, including fiction, essays, and translations. Author of more than thirty books, he died May 26, 2021, at age seventy-seven, in Copenhagen, where he had lived for over forty years. In his last year, handicapped by a benign but ever-growing cyst in his brain, he continued to write, albeit slowly, even hiring an assistant. Celebrating Thomas E. Kennedy illustrates life-long perseverance and commitment, and reminds me, in that way, of John Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist, from 1985. Gardner’s message: Don’t be stopped. “If your friends don’t support what you do,” wrote Gardner, “find new friends.”

Few people have more devoted friends than did Tom Kennedy, as this edition shows, with acclaim by writers and editors in the United States and Europe, such as the renowned Danish poet Pia Tafdrup, the equally renowned American poet and philosopher H.L. Hix, and others; yet, astoundingly, despite Kennedy’s frequent travels and engagement in events, the bibliography at the back of this book—of Tom’s novels, stories, essays, lyrics, interviews, and writings about him—runs over forty pages. It is one of the great examples to be gleaned here: As a writer and lover of life, Tom Kennedy was always in action. I normally am not a fan of festschrifts, but I am a huge fan

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of this book because it identifies qualities of Kennedy’s artistic temperament that any writer would do well to emulate.

Of the major publications in his career, two appear in this memorial edition. One of those, the story “Years in Kaldar,” which Tom submitted to New Jersey’s The Literary Review in 1988, led to a lifelong association with the journal and its editor at the time, Walter Cummins, editor of this book. “Years in Kaldar” became the basis for Kennedy’s first novel, Crossing Borders (Watermark, 1990), of which the fiction writer Susan Tekulve wrote, Tom’s writing was all bright swirls of color . . . an invitation to contemplate a pulsing portrait of a man living in such existential pain that he burns down his “perfectly acceptable” life.

Tekulve identifies here two elements of Kennedy’s style, in which “bright swirls of color” lure the reader into a collision with a character’s “existential pain.” Tom never was one to avert his gaze from human suffering; yet, as a lover of jazz, especially Coltrane, he also was not about to sound just one note. Kennedy knew that his work as a writer involved presenting to the world the spiritual conundrum of simultaneous suffering and joy.

This craft device appears pronounced in Kennedy’s 2007 essay “I Am Joe’s Prostate,” the other of his works featured in this book and one familiar to all steady readers of New Letters. When the essay came out in this magazine, many people refused to read it, put off by its topic of prostate cancer, albeit, as the essay reveals, a misdiagnosis. Even I, editor at the time, paused when the manuscript arrived. “ ‘I am Joe’s Prostate’ marked a turning point in Tom’s writing career,” notes Walter Cummins. The essay won a 2008 National Magazine Award from the American Association of Magazine Editors and led, as Cummins notes, to much wider

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recognition. Everyone, it seemed then, began to read the essay.

At the award ceremony in New York, David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, put his hand on Tom’s shoulder to say, yes, he would read it; and the literary agent Nat Sobel secured for Tom a multi-book deal with Bloomsbury USA. The “Prostate” essay traces Kennedy’s journey through an impersonal, medical labyrinth. Kennedy’s own presence in the essay, however, does not distract him from his essential role, as guide for readers to an important aesthetic: Fear and anxiety over serious illness, or threat of any kind, do not alone satisfy the demands of literary art. “Writing for me, at least, is a messy process,” Kennedy told a panel of interviewers for The Literary Review in 1999. “It is like what I imagine to be heart or nerve surgery: You have to do intricate and delicate things in a mess of blood and guts.” The revelation in that statement lies in the writer’s imagery, itself, his embrace of contrasts, which succeeds as literature only if handled delicately.

Jonathan Yardley points out in a Washington Post discussion of Kennedy’s novel In the Company of Angels—a graphic depiction of torture in Pinochet’s Chile—“An occasional note of humor leavens this dark novel.” Kennedy’s writing serves the artform by confronting readers with such shifts of diction and tone. In the “Prostate” essay, for example, the narrator rides his bicycle to the hospital for his initial diagnosis; riding a bicycle is common for adults in Denmark, but the detail reinforces his persona, especially in America, as childlike, a naive innocent, in contrast even to his own wife, a doctor and stern force behind his entry into this scary new world. The narrator uses the word “pee” for urination, common enough but a clear contrast to the medical term “micturate.”

Such a handy (my term) writerly device, which poet and editor-at-large for The Literary Review, Renée Ashley, notes as

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“riding the cusp between horror and humor,” itself rides on another important writerly impulse. Tom explained to me once at a reading of his memoir Riding the Dog: A Look Back at America that he selects details in such a way as to create of himself a persona, much as he would a fictional character. I found this information revelatory and useful in my own writing. Riding the Dog takes place on a Greyhound bus, starting in North Carolina, where the author tentatively begins to befriend other passengers, who include a man just out of jail, a fellow who gets on board with his belongings in a brown paper bag, and a “brown woman” who pats Tom’s white-boy hand and says, “We take care of you.

We see you come to no harm.” These are not people the author usually meets on his literary tours. The turn comes when he confronts the disparity between his life and theirs, which he tries to conceal from a new-found companion: I consider telling him I was on my way to read a story at a public college in Chicago, where there had been a recent uproar over a Picasso sculpture on display there. It was a cubist sculpture of a woman, and someone suddenly noticed that one of the woman’s breasts was larger than her cranium.

Of course, no. He does not mention those things to his bus mates, and he does not explain to us why mentioning such things there would be not just silly, but laughable.

Tom Kennedy’s professional biography includes positions on the M.F.A. faculties at Vermont College and at Fairleigh Dickinson University; co-editor of Serving House Books, with Walter Cummins; two Pushcart Prizes; two Eric Hoffer Awards; and, perhaps the award that made him happiest, the 2016 Dan Turèll Prize by the Turèll Society in Denmark, named for the late and beloved Danish poet, whom Tom translated into English.

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Kennedy wrote a craft book titled Realism and Other Illusions, but this edition has a special place in Kennedy’s legacy, coming at his work from ways that allow readers to understand not just his art but literary craft, itself, more clearly. As novelist René Steinke writes in “Things I Learned from My Friend, Tom,” her tribute here: “Medical words, PSA, ‘micturate’ can be very funny, even lyrical, when repeated at the right intervals.” At the right intervals can be an intricate and delicate business.