Ironweed

“‘It’s okay with me if I don’t have no headstone,’ Francis said to Rudy, ‘just so’s I don’t die alone.’”

Passing through the cemetery, Francis notices that certain graves are much more impressive than others. However, he also recognizes the futility of such monuments, which merely preserve a name. More important to him are the human connections that bring value to his life, and he spends much of the novel investigating the possibility of repairing those connections, once they have been severed, particularly regarding his family.

“And he won’t feed you till you listen to him preach. I watch the old bums sittin’ there and I wonder about them. What are you all doin’, sittin’ through his bullshit? But they’s all tired and old, they’s all drunks. They don’t believe in nothin’. They’s just hungry.”

Francis observes that the people listening to Rev. Chester’s sermon are only doing so to qualify for a warm meal. His experiences throughout the novel reveal that physical wants and needs often must take precedent over spiritual matters, particularly among those who are desperately poor. Reverend Chester’s meals, clothing gifts, and employment tips prove far more meaningful to Francis than anything he says over the pulpit.

“‘No,’ said Francis. ‘Nobody’s a bum all their life. She hada been somethin’ once.’ ‘She was a whore before she was a bum.’ ‘And what about before she was a whore?’ ‘I don’t know,’ Rudy said. ‘She just talks about whorin’ in Alaska. Before that I guess she was just a little kid.’ ‘Then that’s somethin’. A little kid’s somethin’ that ain’t a bum or a whore.’”

A variety of derogatory labels could be attached to Sandra, who dies in humble circumstances, drunk and alone. Yet Francis perceives that Sandra was first and foremost a person deserving of respect. Francis’s recognition of Sandra’s personhood mirrors Kennedy’s invitation to readers to afford Francis similar respect, despite some of his questionable choices and unfortunate outcomes.

“Francis admitted the futility of preaching to Sandra. Who could preach to Francis in the weeds? But that don’t make it right that she can’t go inside to get warm. Just because you’re drunk don’t mean you ain’t cold.”

The Methodist mission’s welfare program is conditional upon the sobriety of the patrons; it turns away those who are drunk. Here, Francis questions the morality of a policy so uncompromising that it denies Sandra the warmth and shelter she would need to survive the night. Throughout the novel, Francis continues to take note of demeaning and dehumanizing treatment of homeless people, however subtle.

“What was it, Oscar, that did you in? Would you like to tell us all about it? Do you know? It wasn’t Gerald who did me. It wasn’t drink and it wasn’t baseball and it wasn’t really Mama. What was it that went bust, Oscar, and how come nobody ever found out how to fix it for us?”

Reading a story like Francis’s, readers may be tempted to attribute his failings to specific influences or circumstances, just as Francis questions what went wrong for Oscar, the singer. Francis concludes that, while those external influences are part of the picture, they cannot explain everything about a person. The truth is much more nuanced and personal, and there are no easy answers.

“‘She’da died no matter. Her time was up.’ ‘No, I don’t believe that. That’s fatalism. I believe we die when we can’t stand it anymore. I believe we stand as much as we can and then we die when we can, and Sandra decided she could die.’ ‘I don’t fight that. Die when you can. That’s as good a sayin’ as there is.’”

Discussing Sandra’s death with Francis, Helen expresses her belief that one can face death with dignity. This foreshadows her own death, which she calmly anticipates and deliberately prepares for. Instead of seeing herself as a victim of circumstance, Helen maintains faith in her power to choose and to take pride in her choices regardless of others’ judgment.

“Francis began to run, and in so doing, reconstituted a condition that was as pleasurable to his being as it was natural: the running of bases after the crack of the bat, the running from accusation, the running from the calumny of men and women, the running from family, from bondage, from destitution of spirit through ritualistic straightenings, the running, finally, in a quest for pure flight as a fulfilling mannerism of the spirit.”

As Francis reflects on his life, he recognizes a pattern of running (literally and figuratively) from problems, and of running simply for the sake of running. While such behavior does bring a type or degree of freedom, it also comes at a cost, which Francis slowly realizes. As Francis looks back on his life, he concludes that his constant fleeing has caused as many problems as he intended to solve.

“Fornication was standard survival currency everywhere, was it not?”

Her money gone, Helen reluctantly agrees to sleep in Finny’s car, knowing that he would request sexual favors from her. Francis, meanwhile, mentions his willingness, in the past, to have sex with Clara to find a place to sleep. Sex thus serves as a kind of currency for those who have nothing else to exchange. Surprisingly, however, after all her reluctance, Helen expresses a pitying attitude towards Finny, demonstrating her awareness that their desperate circumstances are more to blame than any particular person.

“She has been dead all her life, Francis thought, and for the first time in years he felt pity for this woman, who had been spayed by self-neutered nuns and self-gelded priests. As she yielded her fresh body to her new husband out of obligation, Francis felt the iron maiden of induced chastity piercing her everywhere, tightening with the years until all sensuality was strangulated and her body was as bloodless and cold as a granite angel.”

In this passage, Francis sees his mother, whom he resents, as a product of forces larger than herself. Specifically, he attributes her prudishness to a religious upbringing that, as Francis sees it, drains the life out of her. Francis’s mother’s attitude falls at one end of a spectrum of attitudes about sexual behavior, with Katrina’s more open attitude falling nearer the other end, while Annie seems to represent an ideal (to Francis) middle ground between passion and fidelity.

“You know, a great poet once said that love enters through the eyes. One must be careful not to see too much. One must curb one’s appetites. The world is much too beautiful for most of us. It can destroy us with its beauty.”

Katrina’s uttered warning seems almost prophetic in light of her death by fire, a symbol of passion. Francis, meanwhile, does take her words to heart, in a way; though he loves Katrina, he resolves to secure a love of his own, implying commitment and limitation, which is exactly how he feels when he meets Annie, though he mocks himself for doing so. Katrina, for her part, doesn’t necessarily indulge every appetite, but she does seem to enjoy living dangerously close to the edge.

“My poet says that caged woman with the rabbit in her teeth is the true and awful image of this life, and not the woman moaning aloud her dirge of unattainable hopes…dead, so dead, how sad.”

Here, Katrina presents two images that might represent the human experience. Neither option is particularly appealing, as the woman in the cage is caught between the passion of eating and the guilt of causing harm to the rabbit, even as she trapped in a cage; the other woman, meanwhile, lives in futility and delusion. Francis, like Katrina, experiences a conflict between passion, as exemplified in his violent fits, and the guilt that comes after he harms others. His answer to this dilemma, if he finds one, seems to hinge on the insight that the past, where guilt lives, is no longer real, and no number of mournful dirges can fix or restore it.

“Did they love? No, they never loved. They always loved. They knew a love that Katrina’s poet would abuse and befoul. And they befouled their imaginations with a mutation of love that Katrina’s poet would celebrate and consecrate. Love is always insufficient, always a lie. Love, you are the clean shirt of my soul. Stupid love, silly love.”

This jumbled series of contradictory phrases about love serves not so much to question whether Francis and Katrina made love—they almost certainly did—as to trouble the definition of love. By changing the definition, the answer to the question of whether they loved may also change. These contradictory phrases thus reflect the contradictory nature of love as Francis sees it—at once “stupid” and “silly” even as it takes on almost holy significance as the driving force in his life. Meanwhile, both Francis’s touchy relationship with Helen and his shattered dream of domestic bliss with Annie suggest the insufficiency and deception of love.

“People would perhaps feel that some particular thing went wrong somewhere and that if it had only gone right it wouldn’t have brought a woman like Helen so low. But that is the error; for there are no women like Helen. Helen is no symbol of lost anything, wrong-road-taken kind of person, if-they-only-knew-then kind of person. Helen is no pure instinct deranged, no monomaniacal yearning out of a deep center that wants everything, even the power to destroy itself. Helen is no wandering cat in its ninth termination. For since Helen was born, and so elegantly raised by her father, she has been making her own decisions based on rational thinking, reasonably current knowledge, intuition about limitations, and the usual instruction by friends, lovers, enemies, and others.”

Here, just after reviewing Helen’s life story and just before witnessing the end of her life, the narration withholds from readers the right to judge Helen as symbolic of a certain type of person or to extract simple lessons from her life. The only person with a right to judge the meaning and value of Helen’s life is Helen herself. She does review her life and finds much to celebrate, whatever outside observers may think. 

“Helen has even come to the question of whether or not she is really a Catholic [...] What brought her to this uncertainty is the accumulation of her sins, and if you must call them sins, then there is certainly quite an accumulation. But Helen prefers to call them decisions, which is why she has no compulsion to confess them.”

Throughout her life, Helen takes comfort in her faith, even attending a Mass on the morning before she dies. Yet in examining her beliefs, she finds cause to depart from some tenets of her Catholic faith. Choosing to stand by her decisions, and to refer to them as such, she makes no attempt to confess or explain herself to others. Francis, on the other hand, does confess some of his sins at the hobo jungle, only to feel that the effort was wasted. The most meaningful validation and consolation, it seems, must come from oneself.

“‘You like your hands?’ Francis asked Rosskam. [...] Rosskam looked at his hands, looked at Francis, looked away. ‘I mean it,’ Francis said. ‘I got the idea that my hands do things on their own, you know what I mean?’ ‘Not yet,’ said Rosskam. ‘They don’t need me. They do what they goddamn please.’”

Here, Francis expresses a sense of detachment between conscious will and outward behavior. Having done certain things that, in retrospect, he judges to be wrong, he wonders to what extent he is responsible for actions committed in the heat of the moment. While Francis’s insight may or may not lead to greater self-control (though he does restrain himself from hurting Little Red, he lashes out violently at the hobo jungle), what does change is his own ability to cope with the results of his behavior.

“He loved and half-loved lots of things about Albany. But then one day it’s February again, and it won’t be long now till the snow gets gone again, and the grass comes green again, and then the dance music rises in Francis’s brain, and he longs to flee again, and he flees.”

Although Francis may stay in place for a time, he recognizes his urges to flee as cyclical, much like the seasons: a season of rest proceeds a season of travel. Thus, while it may seem comforting to read a degree of finality into Francis’s apparent decision to return home to Annie, it’s possible, if not probable, that he will set out again at some point, as his nature demands. Now, however, he knows that he will always be welcome back.

“But listen, Annie, I never stopped lovin’ you and the kids, and especially you, and that don’t entitle me to nothin’, and I don’t want nothin’ for sayin’ it, but I went my whole life rememberin’ things here that were like nothin’ I ever saw anywhere in Georgia or Louisiana or Michigan, and I been all over, Annie, all over, and there ain’t nothin’ in the world like your elbows sittin’ there on the table across from me, and that apron all full of stains.”

Francis, Helen, and arguably Rudy all share what seems to be a dream of domestic bliss, but only Francis has a real chance to experience it. For him, being home is all the sweeter knowing what he does about wandering without a place to call home. He derives satisfaction both from being with the people he loves and from the domestic environment itself, as evident in his appreciation of a stained apron.

“Only the light had changed, brighter now, and with it grew Francis’s hatred of all fantasy, all insubstantiality. I am sick of you all, was his thought. I am sick of imagining what you became, what I might have become if I’d lived among you. I am sick of your melancholy histories, your sentimental pieties, your goddamned unchanging faces. [...] You ain’t nothin’ more than a photograph, you goddamn spooks. You ain’t real and I ain’t gonna be at your beck and call no more.”

At several earlier points in the text, Francis tries to reconcile with the ghosts of the past on a one-to-one basis, typically by explaining why he acted the way he did. Unfortunately, doing so never really seems to satisfy the ghosts, who continue to dog him, suggesting that there’s no way to truly make up for those past mistakes. Instead, Francis finally learns to banish the endless parade of ghosts by shifting his focus to what is real and present.

“‘You got a car and a wife and a house and a job?’ Rudy asked. He sat up on his cot and studied this interloper.”

As vagrants, Rudy and Francis spend the vast majority of their time looking for odd jobs, finding shelter, getting from place to place, or meeting other basic needs. The idea that a person could go from being in their position to having those needs met permanently, not to mention getting married, proves fascinating to Rudy. This American dream of sorts remains elusive to him, though not to Francis, who almost feels, upon going home, that it’s too good to be true.

“All them sufferin’ bastards, all them poor souls waitin’ for heaven, walkin’ around with the snow flyin’, stayin’ in empty houses, pants fallin’ off ‘em. When I leave this earth I wanna leave it with a blessing to everybody. Francis never hurt nobody.”

Just as Francis is about to intensify his attack on Little Red, he backs off, seeing a vision of the women he’s known, and he offers this statement of intent. Though the last part of the statement is objectively not true, the quote as a whole reflects his emotions at that moment, showing a gentle, compassionate side of him that, with practice, could help him to overcome some of his more aggressive tendencies. His list of afflictions comes from personal observation, if not experience, and the comment about snow would be timely on the first day of November.

“For Francis knew now that he was at war with himself, [...] and if he was ever to survive, it would be with the help not of any socialistic god but with a clear head and a steady eye for the truth; for the guilt he felt was not worth the dying. It served nothing except nature’s insatiable craving for blood. The trick was to live, to beat the bastards, survive the mob and that fateful chaos, and show them all what a man can do to set things right, once he sets his mind to it.”

When Francis participates in the trolley strike, he does so in the hopes of effecting political change. Later, he comes to feel that political solutions to his problems are unlikely, if not impossible. Instead, he must learn to survive the internal war between guilt and the need to move forward. Francis realizes that setting things right does not mean fixing the past but rather making the most of the present.

“‘You killed a guy?’ ‘More’n one.’ ‘Accidental, was it?’ ‘No. I tried to get that one guy, Allen. He was takin’ my job.’ ‘That’s a good reason.’ ‘Maybe, maybe not. Maybe he was just doin’ what he had to do.’ ‘Baloney,’ Old Shoes said. [He continued:] ‘That’s what everybody does, good, bad, and lousy. Burglars, murderers.’ And Francis fell quiet, sinking into yet another truth requiring handling.”

Francis questions his reasons for killing Harold Allen, the strikebreaking trolley conductor, on the grounds that Allen was just doing what he had to do. Old Shoes counters that the same argument can apply to virtually anyone, including Francis. While this concept doesn’t solve any of Francis’s problems, it does open the way for him to see his actions in context.

“He knew he was somehow stronger, more given to violence, more in love with the fugitive dance, but this was all so for reason that had nothing to do with intent. [...] Could anyone in possession of Francis’s perspective on himself believe that he was responsible for Rowdy Dick, or the hole in the runt’s neck, or the bruises on Little Red, or the scars on other men long forgotten or long buried?”

Francis differentiates between his violent nature and his intent, which are at odds. The rhetorical question that follows invites readers to consider whether Francis can truly be held responsible for his worst actions, when they are committed not under the influence of some external drug but rather through the workings of some part of his brain that seems alien even to himself. Critically, the question assumes that the one evaluating Francis has access to Francis’s “perspective on himself” (215), because only Francis can truly differentiate between what is involuntary and what is deliberate.