Q&A: William Kennedy, Author of Chango's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes
By Mike Rogers Sep 15, 2011Next month, Viking will publish Pulitzer Prize–winning author William Kennedy's latest novel, Changó's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes (see the starred review). It's an amalgam of politics, mysticism, gangsters, romance, jazz, and Hemingway. Set against the backdrop of the U.S. civil rights movement and Castro's overthrow of Batista, the plot unfurls through the eyes of Daniel Quinn, a young reporter visiting Havana in 1957, searching for a story. And, boy, does he find one! Media Editor and longtime Kennedy fan Mike Rogers recently talked to Kennedy about the story's genesis, his thematic use of music, and the influence of James Joyce.
MR: Your book has a mysterious title (although it will grab readers). Would you explain its meaning?
WK: Changó is a mythological warrior in the novel, an orisha in the Santeria religion in Cuba, and both main
characters, Quinn and Renata, come to value him and find him a presence in their lives. He is manifested in red and white beads, which play a role in the story. The two-tone shoes become singular artifacts in the Albany part of the story, emblematic of the lives of both Tremont Van Ort and George Quinn [characters who represent opposite dynamics—Ed.] on this racially troubled day in June 1968.
MR: Revolution is a dominant theme here, and you juxtapose Castro's overthrow of Batista with the American civil rights movement of the 1960s (that was an eye-opener). Do you view the civil rights movement as a revolution of sorts?
WK: The civil rights movement was a prolonged revolution against the U.S. social order as it was then racially constructed, and it changed that order radically: changed the voting law, ended much school segregation, empowered blacks politically, and changed American racial attitudes to the point where we now have a black president—an impossibility in 1968. Activists in the movement often put their lives on the line in their battle against repressive and racist police and politicians all over the country. This is a perpetual revolution, and in 2011 it is being challenged by a new generation of racists.
MR: I was quite delighted to see Hemingway appear (I'm a huge fan), but he takes the story in a different direction. Why include him? Also, what's your relationship with him, and how did you approach writing him?
WK: Hemingway was a revolutionary in the writing of fiction, an early hero of mine. As a journalist and novelist, he wrote often about revolution and war, as Quinn wants to do, and Quinn learns from him. His story is also allied to the Cuban revolution, and I couldn't imagine writing about Cuba without including him. He's a serious presence there still, half a century after his death. I never met him, but I know him better than I know some of my best friends, and I heard (and imagined) stories about him that seemed worth telling.
MR: Besides Hemingway, you also include a rather charming Fidel Castro and Bing Crosby. Is using real people as fictional characters a new development for you?
WK: I've written often about real characters in my novels—Jack (Legs) Diamond, Arnold Rothstein, Jimmy Walker, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Al Smith, Damon Runyon, William Randolph Hearst, Thomas E. Dewey, and more—all, like Bing and Hemingway, creatures of the American imagination.
MR: Music, particularly jazz, features prominently here. Are you musical? Do you play music, or do you just like listening to it? Also, what is music's significance in your work?
WK: I am a lifelong jazz fan, and in high school I played drums and banjo in a few amateur pickup bands. I am not now nor have I ever been a real musician. I listen to music all the time and started a record collection when I was 13, before I owned a phonograph. I wrote liner notes for Frank Sinatra's Reprise collection. Music turns up frequently in my novels, especially in Changó. Music is a major theme of this novel and is one of the elements that compelled me to write this book.
MR: Your books are connected through the use of common characters and settings. Where would you place Changó in the fabric of your overall body of work?
WK: Changó has links to other of my novels in the Albany Cycle and is the one that carries farthest forward in time—to 1968. It also deals with racial matters more than any of my other novels.
MR: I loved the George Quinn character, whose partial senility leaves him believing he's still living in the past, and I assumed that he's the personification of the old Albany, the world long gone. Was that your intent for him?
WK: George Quinn presents to the world a lyrical, white, Irish Catholic working-class mentality as it might have existed in Albany around 1910–20. It does not occur to George that it is now 1968.
MR: I detect a heavy influence of James Joyce in your work. Would you agree?
WK: I used to read Joyce the way I listened to jazz. I'm sure he influenced the way I write, but he influenced the way everybody writes. He is what we know. His methods have been basic tools in creating narrative since 1922. When my prose bogs down, I read Ulysses, which is the literary equivalent of speed.
MR: I must ask the inevitable closing question: What's next?
WK: What's next, I don't know; maybe a new draft of a play I started years ago and never finished properly. I'm unemployed, and I think I like it.
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