Bridgewater Review

Volume 2 | Issue 1 Article 4

Oct-1983

Rediscovering James T. FarrellCharles FanningBridgewater State College

This item is available as part of Virtual Commons, the open-access institutional repository of Bridgewater State University, Bridgewater, Massachusetts.

Recommended CitationFanning, Charles (1983). Rediscovering James T. Farrell. Bridgewater Review, 2(1), 3-6.Available at: http://vc.bridgew.edu/br_rev/vol2/iss1/4

-------------------------Rediscovering

James T.Farrell

by Charles Fanning

N o major American writer has been worse served by criticism thanJames T. Farrell. After the publication in 1935 of his first fictional

series, the Studs Lonigan trilogy, Farrell labored for four decades underan unjust and unfounded critical accusation. During these years, manyinfluential critics dealt with his fiction as it appeared by mechanicalcitation of a party line which ran as follows: "James T. Farrell is that sadcase, a one-book writer. Studs Lonigan is credible fiction, albeit in thelimiting and dated naturalistic mode pioneered by Theodore Dreiser. Buthis subsequent novels have been obsessive reworkings of the samematerials, and nowhere near as good as Studs." The primarily NewYork-based writers who mouthed this line became the American criticalestablishment of the 1940s and 1950s, and their dismissal of Farrell wasrepeated in the academy by the next generation of scholar/teachers,many of whom never took the trouble to read the books in question.

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I n the 1970s, this unconscionable situation finally began to change.In the last year of his life (he died at seventy-five in 1979), Farrell

received unmistakable signs that the tide was turning. These includedthe television mini-series of Studs Lonigan, several honorary degrees,arid the Emerson-Thoreau medal of the American Academy of Arts andSciences. I want here to urge the continued reevaluation of Farrell'swork by suggesting the importance, in particular of his second series ofnovels, the O'Neill-O'Flaherty pentalogy, which bore the brunt of critical

ostracism and misreading, because the fivenovels appeared between 1936, the yearafter Studs, and 1953, at the beginning of thelowest ebb of Farrell's reputation.

J ames T. Farrell was born in 1904 andraised in a South Side Chicago

neighborhood that became the setting formuch of his remarkable body of fiction.Filling to date some fifty volumes, this workincludes hundreds of stories and four largefictional cycles: the Studs Lonigan trilogy,the O'Neill-O'Flaherty pentalogy, theBernard Carr trilogy, and the Universe ofTime sequence, of which nine volumes werepublished before Farrell's death. The firsttwo groups, the three Lonigan and fiveO'Neill novels, share a setting (the SouthSide neighborhood around WashingtonPark where Farrell himself grew up), a timeframe (roughly, 1900 to 1930), and severalcharacters. These eight "Washington Park"novels actually comprise one grand designwith two contrasting and complementarymovements: the downward, negativealternative embodied in Studs Lonigan, whodies pointlessly, and the upward, positivepossibility embodied in Danny O'Neill, wholives to become a writer. The great tragedyof the wholly inadequate critical response toFarrell's work is that Studs Lonigan hasbeen seen as the whole story, when, in fact,it isn't even half of the story aboutWashington Park.

-------------Filling . .. some fifty volumes,this work includes hundreds ofstories and four large fictionalcycles.

------------ -With a wisdom uncommon in beginning

writers, Farrell knew that before he couldtell the second part of the story, so muchcloser to his own experience than Studs's,he had first to deal with an attitude that, hadit been applied to autobiographicalmaterials, would have negated his aim ofobjectivity; that is, the young artist's exag­gerated hatred and rejection of hisbackground. In part, Studs Lonigan is theexorcism desired by young Danny O'Neillwhen, in the middle ofthe Lonigan trilogy, inwhich he is a minor figure, he vows that"Some day, he would drive thisneighborhood and all his memories of itout of his consciousness with a book."Beginning with Young Lonigan: A Boy­hood in Chicago Streets (1932), thesenovels trace the downward drift to death oftheir hapless, misguided protagonist. A

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normally inquisitive boy, Studs shows signsof intelligence, even imagination, in earlyscenes. And yet he assumes the facile andcorrupting "tough guy" values of theChicago street-corner society to which he isdrawn after graduation from eighth grade.As a partial explanation of the boy's failureof judgment, the trilogy chronicles thebreakdown in the twentieth-century city ofthe previously directing institutions offamily, school, and church, and Studs'sorigin in a well-fixed, middle-class familymakes the indictment of urban "spiritualpoverty" (Farrell's phrase) all the moresevere. The result is a powerful narrative,terrifying in its seemingly inexorableprogress to Judgment Day (1935).

Instead of the tight, fatalistic narrativedrive of the Lonigan trilogy, the five O'Neill­O'Flaherty novels are more open andepisodic, and in this looser structure isembodied a broader, fuller, but stillunsentimentalized view of urban society.Moreover, in his complex creation of theinterrelated lives of the O'Neills andO'Flahertys, Farrell has provided the mostthoroughly realized embodiment inAmerican literature of three generations ofIrish American life. The novels are asfollows: A World I Never Made (1936), No

Jallles TFarrell·

Star Is Lost (1938), Father and Son (1940),My Days of Anger (1943), and The Face ofTime (1953). Taken together, they are agreat achievement in characterization,setting, and structure, one that has not beensufficiently acknowledged.

T he portraits of three generations ofIrish Americans, from the nineteenth­

century immigrant laborer to a twentieth­century intellectual and artist, are com­pelling in their fullness and definition. Astrong-willed immigrant matriarch, MaryO'Flaherty dominates the early novels. Anaging, retired teamster, her husband Tom isa quiet man who comes to life only in theconcluding volume, The Face of Time.Their children live out a range of responsesto the second-generation ethnic dilemma atthe turn of the century: cut off from faith intheir parents' culture by shame andpressure to assimilate, they have had tomake sense of the world on their own. Shoe­salesman Al O'Flaherty embraces HoratioAlger's dream of success by hard work andself-education. His brother Ned puts hisfaith in the simplistic anaesthesia of a hazy,pop philosophy, "the power of the wish."Margaret O'Flaherty is caught painfullybetween her Catholic training in the

neighborhood and the jazzy hedonism ofthe Loop, where she works as a hotelcashier. Her sister Lizz, married to poorly­paid teamster Jim O'Neill with a new childevery year, retreats into a concentratedpiety that insulates her from the constantcrises of her daily life. A decent, pragmaticworking man, Jim O'Neill fights tough oddsto make a better life for his children, andloses to three paralyzing strokes. In Fatherand Son, he faces uselessness, boredom,and death with heroic courage and dignity.

I n the third generation, the maincharacter is Lizz and Jim's son, Danny

O'Neill, a slightly younger South Sidecontemporary of Studs Lonigan who takesanother road -- out of Chicago and toward

areas such as Washington Park providedand lacked for working and lower-middle­class urban Americans, and how this worldchanged over time, specifically from the latenineteenth century to the summer of 1927.Indeed, the choice of setting provides one ofthe classic and complementary elementsconnecting the O'Neill-O'Flaherty novelsand Studs Lonigan. The street and the parkemerge in the two series as archetypalopposing options for the city child. Eachrepresents a possible way of growing up,with its own pantheon of heroes. The choiceof Studs Lonigan, the street, is thedestructive element, characterized by ganglife with its brutalization of finer instincts bypressures to conform: to fight, drink,dissipate energy and time, all in the service

park and practices baseball by the hourthrough his childhood years. Significantly,the recurrent, ever-receding dream of StudsLonigan's short, unhappy life is of his oneafternoon in Washington Park with LucyScanlan during their eighth-grade summer.So the twig is bent for both boys, and theopposition of street and park as settings iscentral to Farrell's complementarydelineation of the mix of character andenvironment that brings Danny to hisvocation as an artist and Studs to his graveat twenty-nine.

After characterization and setting, thethird, and the least critically recognized,element of Farrell's achievement in theO'Neill-O'Flaherty series is its thematicstructure. Farrell has made this 2500-page

A lazy game of croquet whiles away the day in Washington Park around the turn of the century.

understanding and control of his life.Danny's environment is less stable thanStuds's -- the O'Flahertys are raising himbecause the O'Neills are so poor -- but he ismore intelligent than Studs, and he is drivenby a persistent dream of accomplishmentthat crystallizes into the desire to be awriter. His story is the first Americanportrait of the artist in which the young manemerges from the Catholic working class.

A s to setting, Farrell's characters exist ina place as fully and vividly presented as

any in fiction. These books tell us in con­crete detail what it looked, sounded,smelled, and felt like to live in Chicagoapartment-house neighborhoods, what

of an ideal of being "tough and the realstuff." The center of street life inWashington Park is Charley Bathcellar'spoolroom on Fifty-eighth Street near the Elstation; its heroes are the gamblers,drinkers, and loafers who congregate there.The park, on the other hand, is the creativeand liberating element, the setting for apastoral dream of release from the disordersof the streets and the claustrophobia ofapartment living. The center of park life isthe athletic field, a lined-out grassy placewhere rules are clear and enforced andsuccess and failure are unambiguous. Itsheroes are sports figures, from park leaguestars to the Chicago White Sox, the pride ofthe South Side. Danny O'Neill chooses the

sequence a single, coherent work of artwithout impeding its realistic narrative flow,by means of his brilliant organization of thematerial around two powerful themes. Twostreams of experience mingle in thesepages: the outer stream of social life, achronicle of the works and days of threegenerations of Chicagoans, and the innerstream of consciousness, the perceptions ofthat chronicle and of themselves in theminds of the individuals living it. Throughoutthe series, the same two watershedexperiences recur, always embodying majorthemes. These are death and illuminatingrevery. Deaths in the family constitute thecentral events of the outer stream andemphasize the most important social theme

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-------------------------Farrell perfected an urban American plainstyle, as the fitting mode for registering theself-consciousness of ordinary peopleliving relatively uneventful lives.

I n his fiction, Farrell perfected an urbanAmerican plain style, as the fitting

mode for registering the self-consciousnessof ordinary people living relativelyuneventful lives, In his best work, a hard­won, minimal, eloquence emerges naturallyfrom the convincingly registered thoughts ofcharacters such as Jim O'Neill and Old TomO'Flaherty. The authentic eloquence oftheir daydream/soliloquies remains one ofFarrell's greatest achievements.

Farrell was first and foremost anAmerican realist: fiercely and scrupulouslyhonest, immune to sentimentality, andcommitted to giving serious literaryconsideration to the common life. Thethemes of his fiction are embedded in thecontest of a fully realized narrative world,consistent with what he saw as "myconstant and major aim as a writer .. to writeso that life may speak for itself." Becausethese themes are so important and sothoroughly grounded in American, urban,and ethnic realities, it will become clear tomore and more readers that James T.Farrell has done for twentieth-century IrishAmerica what William Carleton did fornineteenth-century Ireland. ThomasFlanagan's placement of Carleton appliesalso to Farrell: "From the broken land ofgunmen and gallows, of bent men uponbitter soil and lovers 'scattered likenosegays' across the meadows, came awriter so gifted that he could show useverything at once."

Charles Fanning teaches Irish andAmerican Literature at Bridgewater and isthe author of several articles and threeIbooks. Supported by fellowships from theNational Endowments for the Humanities

land the Rockefeller Foundation, his mainresearch interest has been the Irishimmigrant experience in America.

stories and novellas, in which hispresentation of twentieth-century lifebecame even more inclusive.

In 1963, Farrell published The Silence ofHistory, the first novel of his fourth fictionalcycle, A Universe of Time, which, in hisheroic projection, was to have run to thirtyvolumes. Integrated by the centralrecurrent character of Eddie Ryan, anotherChicago writer, born, like his creater, in1904, the Universe cycle embodies areassessment of Farrell's life-long concernwith the experience of the artist in themodern world, as well as a continuation ofthe "lifework" that he defined in anintroduction to the new cycle's sixth unit,Judith (1969), as "a panoramic story of ourdays and years, a story which wouldcontinue through as many books as I wouldbe able to write."

F arrell's critical writings also fill severalvolumes, beginning with A Note on

Literary Criticism of 1936. These containuseful explanations of the relationship be­tween his life and his work, and unfailinglyperceptive appreciations of writers andthinkers as diverse as Marx, Dewey,Dostoievsky, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Dreiser,Fitzgerald, and Ibsen. Of particular interestto students of Irish culture will be therecently published collection of Farrell'swritings On Irish Themes (University ofPennsylvania Press, 1982, edited by DennisFlynn).

O'Flaherty series is a major literaryachievement by any measure, and the factthat all five novels are currently out of printis nothing less than a scandal.

In addition to the Lonigan and O'Neillcomplementary cycles, the Farrell

canon contains many other riches.Published between 1946 and 1952, the Ber­nard Carr trilogy continues the action of theO'Neill novels in dealing with the youngmanhood of a working-class Chicago Irish­man with literary ambitions who has fled toNew York in search of experience andperspective. His emergence as a successfulwriter takes place in the context of a vividrendering of the lives of New York left-Wingintellectuals in the 1930s. Farrell alsopublished several isolated novels includingNew Year's Eve/1929, a matchless study ofmodern man's retreat from the fear of deathinto a life of voyeurism, and over 250 short

of the series, what Farrell in his introductionto Father and Son called "the tragedy of theworker, the central social tragedy of ourtimes." Solitary reveries are the centralevents of the individual inner streams ofconsciousness in the series, and theseemphasize what I take to be the mostimportant internal, or psychological theme ­- the inability of these people to articulate toone another their real perceptions, insights,and feelings. Clarifications of life and honestself-assessment come only in dreams anddaydreams, and they are never shared. Thistheme gathers force in the three lastvolumes of the series, in which three majorcharacters die without having spoken theirminds to anyone. Crippled by three strokes,Danny's father, Jim O'Neill, spends his lastdays in silent revery by the parlor window,unable to share his struggle for meaningwith another living soul. Throughout theseries, Danny's grandmother, Mary

O'Flaherty, has held back from expressingher softer emotions, and the only full senseof her character and concerns comes in alast, beautiful daydream in which she admitsthe pains of emigration, family deaths, andsuffering that she has kept to herself forsixty years. Finally, her husband, Old TomO'Flaherty, dies of a painful stomachcancer in The Face of Time, and revealsonly in a last, lonely soliloquy his own sadsecrets .. he has never felt at home inAmerica, he is puzzled and embittered athaving worked so hard and ended up with solittle, and he wishes he were dying in Ireland.

D anny O'Neill's movement in the direc­tion of art provides effective

counterpoint to the clarifying but unsharedreveries and unprotesting deaths of hisrelatives. He comes to understand the socialtragedy of his family's thwarted lives and thepsychological tragedy of their failure tocommunicate, and with understandingcomes the resolution to use writing as aweapon against both tragedies: "His peoplehad not been fulfilled ....Yes, he was thefirst of his family who could go forth fullyarmed and ready to fight." Danny's isolatedbattling toward significant speech in Fatherand Son and My Days of Anger serves, byits uniqueness, to underscore the problems.. some internal, some imposed from outside.. of the Irish-American working-classculture in which he grows up. The O'Neill-

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