Raymond Kennedy; mined Mass. for oft-praised novels
Milltowns in Western Massachusetts, teeming with blue-collar families descended from Irish and French-Canadian immigrants, formed the bedrock of Raymond Kennedy's fiction.
Ireland Parish was his fictional stand-in for places such as Holyoke and Belchertown, Mr. Kennedy's version of Yoknapatawpha County, which William Faulkner created to capture the Mississippi of his youth. Though Mr. Kennedy mostly plied his trade in New York City, returning to Massachusetts for visits and occasionally to teach, his imagination lingered in the towns and valleys that formed him as a writer.
"In some ways, he never left Massachusetts," Branwynne Kennedy said of her father, who was 73 when he died in Long Island College Hospital in Brooklyn on Feb. 18 of complications of a stroke. "The whole New England landscape was so much a part of his interior landscape. He wrote and spoke about it in such mythical terms and remained a New Englander until the end."
He may have been a New Englander at heart, but "it never kept him in an 'I Heart New England' T-shirt," said David Gordon of Melrose, who took a writing class from Mr. Kennedy at Columbia University.
"I think he thought New England was both awesome and awful," Gordon said. "He loved it in the sense that it had all of the darkness and light of human experience and history. He found in New England all the material he would ever need."
That material filled eight novels, all but one set in Western Massachusetts. Finely drawn characters are dropped into broodingly comic situations, often just after World War II, the years of Mr. Kennedy's adolescence.
The title character in his 1988 novel "Lulu Incognito" lives in Ireland Parish, "in a decaying tenement district that stretched along the Misquamicutt River below the dam."
"She lived with her mother and grandmother in a fifth-floor walk-up on South Summer Street," he wrote. "Their kitchen windows looked out onto vacant lots and a distant industrial canal. At evening, the canal waters turned a murky red in the setting sun."
Warmly received by top writers and praised by many critics, his work remained largely unbidden and unbought by readers.
Take Mr. Kennedy's dark love story "Columbine," published in 1980. The late Raymond Carver, whose short stories towered over the literary landscape of the '80s, called it "the genuine article, a novel that will last." Like all but two of Mr. Kennedy's novels, "Columbine" is out of print.
"His publishing history has been a series of dropped balls: Publishers folding, publicists vamoosing, reviews not running - kisses of death so familiar to the midlist author, but in his case, it's been a real smoocharama," Katherine A. Powers, who reviews books for the Globe, wrote of Mr. Kennedy in April 2000. "Still he seems buoyant."
Born in Wilbraham, Mr. Kennedy grew up in Belchertown and Holyoke, then served in the Army after high school. In his early 20s, he began studying at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, graduating in 1960 with a degree in English.
His mentors included Ted Hughes, the British poet who taught at the university after marrying Sylvia Plath, and Bob Tucker, a renowned creative writing teacher.
"My Father's Orchard," Mr. Kennedy's first novel, was published in 1963 when he was 29. By the late 1970s, his writing began to attract attention from the likes of Gordon Lish, a legendary fiction editor at Esquire magazine and the Alfred A. Knopf publishing house. By choosing which authors to publish, Lish ignited careers such as Carver's, but his extensive trimming and shaping of writers' original manuscripts is still being debated, as recently as December in The New Yorker.
Mr. Kennedy's work was no exception. The manuscript for his third book, "The Flower of the Republic," ran close to 1,000 pages before Lish cut it to 128, according to David Gordon and Branwynne Kennedy.
"My father admired Gordon Lish; they had a good relationship as writer and editor," she said. "However, I think at times he questioned the decisions that Lish made."
Mr. Kennedy, who worked as a staff editor at Collier's Encyclopedia and Encyclopedia Americana, always showed his manuscripts to his wife, Gloria, who was his "first and best reader," Branwynne Kennedy said, Her parents, she said, remained close friends after separating in the late 1980s, about 20 years after marrying. Gloria Kennedy died in 2002.
During her years of casting an initial editing eye on his manuscripts, Mr. Kennedy's books kept attracting critical praise, if not sales.
Of "Ride a Cockhorse," published in 1991, Chicago Tribune book critic Joseph Coates wrote: "Raymond Kennedy is a novelist of such diabolical artistry that he may be the most original American writer since Flannery O'Connor."
The following year,
Mr. Kennedy, who according to his daughter "had a craggy aspect both physically and in his character," was also a respected writing teacher at Columbia University.
"I have to say Raymond was a real master teacher in the way he encouraged people to write in whatever genre worked best for them," Gordon said. "He didn't want everyone to be Henry James. He didn't want everybody to be Raymond Kennedy. He wanted people to find their own voice, and he encouraged that while holding them to very high standards."
Clad in a tweed jacket and tie, Mr. Kennedy "really pressed students to transgress the boundaries of their imagination," Gordon said. "Raymond had great respect for convention, but there was nothing he liked more than flouting convention, as well, and his characters certainly did that."
Now and then after students filed out of the classroom, the real class began close to Columbia in the West End bar, where Mr. Kennedy would guide his students into "sometimes raucous conversation, and they weren't highbrow all the time," Gordon said. "He could go there, but they sometimes were definitely lowbrow."
There Mr. Kennedy sat amid the youthful ardor for writing, nudging along the debate.
"He had an eternal twinkle in his eye," Gordon said, "and I will always remember that twinkle as he leaned over to say something sassy about the scene that was unfolding before him."
A memorial service will be announced. 