Raymond Kennedy Totally Explained

Everything about Raymond Kennedy totally explained

Raymond Kennedy (March 3, 1934 - February 18, 2008) was an American writer known for his dark, grotesque, absurdist novels.

Early Life

Kennedy was born in Western Massachusetts in Wilbraham, and spent his early childhood in the country town of Belchertown on the edge of the old Quabbin Valley. The years spent here loomed large in Kennedy's imagination. He could remember vividly the great hurricane of 1938 which charged across New England creating untold damage and destruction. As he recounted decades later, he could remember seeing young trees snapping in the winds outside his family's kitchen window early on that day. This scene outside the window, was the prelude to the greatest natural disaster in American history until that time.
   These same years saw the transformation of the Quabbin valley into the Quabbin Resevoir, a transformation which uprooted numerous towns and villages in order to supply Boston's burgeoning population with drinking water. The legislation behind this project took three decades to wend its way through the government of the state of Massachusetts, however, by the closing of the 1930's and the end of Kennedy's small childhood, the fate of the towns and villages was finalized and their history ended. By 1940, "the great waters" began to rise and the Quabbin Valley ceased to exist.
   Churches, homes, school houses, general stores, and train depots were covered in water. Legend had it that not all the Quabbin Valley residents had agreed to go, and not all the resting corpses had been dug up and moved, and young Kennedy heard tales of Quabbin ghosts and the haunted hills around the old valley. To a young child, who necessarily believes in the permanence of everything about him, this entire story must have seemed incredible and was surely incomprehensible.
   These early experiences left a mark on Kennedy and shaped his writing in several ways. Each is a story of the awesome power of nature and her elements, and even more, of the amorality of nature and of the moral ambiguity of man.
   Shortly after these events, the Kennedy family left the countryside and settled in Holyoke, a mill town in the industrial heart of the Connecticut River Valley. Here, as in so many New England towns of the period, a tumble of Irish and French immigrants crowded the tenements and worked for meagre wages in the factories, while the by-products of their labor polluted the land around them. The catholic religion which bound the two immigrant groups together, formed the spiritual core of their cultural landscape. This community would in time also come to be part of the fictional world of Kennedy's novels.

Writing Life

After serving in the U.S. Army, Kennedy returned home and under the G.I. bill, studied at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, graduating in 1960 with a degree in English. While there, he studied under the poets Ted Hughes and Joseph Langland, as well as the renowned writing teachers, Bob Tucker and Doris Abramson. Shortly after graduating, Kennedy moved to New York City's Greenwich Village.
   Throughout the 1960's, he worked as a staff editor, first for Collier's Encyclopedia and later for the Encyclopedia Americana while writing in his free time. His first novel, My Father's Orchard, was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1963 to some critical acclaim. The story is that of a young man on the edge of adulthood who struggles to reconcile the young man he's becoming with the childhood he's leaving behind. At the heart of the book is the troubled relationship between the protagonist and his father. This short lyrical book is suffused with moving, evocative imagery of the New England countryside and foreshadows the role that such landscapes would come to play in Kennedy's work.
   His next novel, Good Night, Jupiter, was published by Atheneum in 1970. Good Night, Jupiter shows the beginnings of Kennedy's distinctly boisterous, baroque prose style and incorporates some of the comic and grotesque themes that would dominate his mature work. The story, set on Christmas day, begins bizarrely and hilariously when two young boys take it upon themselves to inter a deceased town elder after the hearse carrying the dead man has to be abandoned in the midst of snow storm. Throughout the rest of the holiday afternoon and evening, the boys pitch from one comic episode to another, ever mindful of the stashed corpse they must hide until they can properly bury him. This book received praise from writers and critics such as James Purdy and Lionel Trilling. Trilling said of the book: "one doesn't often come on a novel which shows so much energy and vivacity of spirit."
   Shortly after the publication of Good Night, Jupiter, Kennedy's work came to the attention of the editor Gordon Lish who was fiction editor of Esquire magazine at the time. Lish published Kennedy's novella, A Private Station, as a short story under the name "Room Temperature" in 1972 in Esquire. Thus began a long term association with Gordon Lish. "Room Temperature" was also featured in the Lish-edited anthology: "The Secret Lives of Our Times: Fiction from Esquire." In the introduction, Tom Wolfe called Kennedy's story "a case study for the understanding of current fiction." A Private Station was restored to its original form and published privately in the United States in 2005 and by Klett-Cotta in Germany in 2006.
   In this novella, Kennedy tells the story of a man named Jack who lives in total isolation in the wilderness until one snowy evening he finds a half-dead tramp in the snow outside of his cabin. At first Jack does what he can to restore the man to health until Dick begins to take on an almost sinister quality, ordering Jack about and speaking angrily about disrelated things. The reader comes to realize that Dick is a kind of malevolent, angel of death figure. This sad but comic story is about the ultimate bewilderment of man. This tale provides a crucial link between Kennedy's work and the theatre of the absurd which had a profound impact on him. Although this is his only frankly absurdist drama, all of his books deal with the themes most prominent in that literary movement, especially with the role of the grotesque.
   This book ushered in the 1970s, a troubled decade for Kennedy in his personal and literary life. In a curious parallel, Kennedy himself seemed to enter into the wilderness. He spent part of the 1970's living in various towns in the New England of his youth and parts of it in New York City. He was married by now, to Gloria Berezofsky. The couple's only child, Branwynne, was born in 1974 in Western Massachusetts. With mounting personal problems, he continued writing, though his work life was somewhat sporadic. He worked simultaneously on two things that he'd later consider to be the major achievements of his life: a novel, The Flower of the Republic and a philosophical work, The Logic of Discovery. Of the latter, he himself characterized working on it as like being inside the labyrinth, with a million index cards to sort through. It was never finished and Kennedy destroyed it before his death, saving only the introductory chapter.
   The Flower of the Republic had a similar, convoluted and troubled history. In its original, unedited form the epic-length novel ran close to a thousand pages. It was conceived of by Kennedy as a Rabelasian, picaresque profane novel and its form was loosely based upon the traveling bard story cycles of the Graeco-Oriental romance stories of the ancient world. The hero, Professor Prudhomme, is traveling the New England countryside looking for his missing wife Priscilla. In doing so, he's recounting episodes from his own life and hers to everyone he casually encounters on the way. Weaving together mythical episodes, obscure New England histories, and the mundane details of a gone rural way of life, Kennedy creates a celebration of a place and a past. The novel is ultimately about man's search for himself in the world outside himself and of man's use of personal histories and personal fictions to fix himself permanently in the impermanent world he must live in.
In 1982, he joined the faculty of Columbia University, where he taught creative writing until his retirement in 2006.

Literary Works

His novels include:

My Father's Orchard
Good Night, Jupiter
Columbine
The Flower of the Republic
Lulu Incognito
Ride a Cockhorse
The Bitterest Age
A Private Station
The Romance of Eleanor Gray

Further Information

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