This superb biography of James T. Farrell shows why the genre is so vital to an appreciation of literature and the literary life. Farrell is now an overlooked writer. To discover why this is so is to explore how his career played itself out and how literary fashions change, as well as to understand the roles politics, the publishing industry, and literary criticism play in making and breaking writers’ reputations.
Born in 1904, Farrell grew up on Chicago’s South Side among the Irish who would become the most important characters in his fiction. His father was a teamster who did a reasonably good job of supporting his large family. But Farrell was never close to his father, and he never understood why at the age of two he was shuffled off to his grandparents while the rest of his siblings remained at home.
This separation from home and hearth, so to speak, made the young and sensitive boy somewhat of an aloof observer. On one memorable occasion, Farrell’s father spotted him walking down the street, and when young Jimmy realized that he was being watched, he ducked out of sight. The biographer reports but does not comment on this incident, although it seems emblematic of Farrell’s relationship with his community: He was there to see, not to be seen.
Not that on the face of it Farrell was anything like an estranged youth. Except for his inability to attract the girls he was interested in, Jimmy Farrell was a regular guy–good at sports (baseball, football, and basketball)–but not especially brainy or studious. His main ambition was to become a great baseball player.
Farrell grew up in the Catholic faith, evincing no desire to rebel or to question orthodoxy. He went to Catholic schools, pumped gas that helped fund two years at the University of Chicago, and gave his family part of his earnings. Nothing in his early years suggests Farrell was cut out to be a writer.
Yet his ambition to become someone set him apart from his mates. He was the first in his family to go to college; although the University of Chicago was just blocks away from his home, it was an unusual choice for an Irish lad. But he had decided, after an injury to his knee, that he would never be able to play professional sports. Perhaps, he thought, he could become a lawyer.
While still in high school Farrell had begun writing for the school newspaper. He liked the sense of power and independence associated with speaking his mind. College, he supposed, could help him hone his forensic skills. Then he came under the spell of an English professor, James Weber Linn, who was also a newspaper columnist. Linn did what I wish more English professors would do: He talked about his writing, about how he became a writer, about how hard it had been, and about how he still had a good deal to learn. This approach to teaching writing to young people is far more effective than only relying on the pretense of authority derived from analyzing errors and giving out grades.
But of course the truth is most English professors are not really writers and could not write engaging newspaper columns to save their lives. In fact, most teachers of writing are not writers and therefore cannot interest their students in writing as a living process. But Linn not only taught James T. Farrell that writing is a lifetime commitment, he also published his student’s work in his column.
Farrell quit college after two years and went to New York City to become a full-time writer. His first efforts were failures. He returned to Chicago and spent more time at the university. He went to Paris and received encouragement from Ezra Pound. Farrell wrote and wrote and wrote. Eventually the persistent Farrell found a form in which to write about his main subject: why so many of the South Side Irish failed to rise above their squalid environment, instead ending up, like Studs Lonigan, with short and unfulfilled lives, while a few others, like Danny O’Neill and like Farrell himself, were able not only to succeed but to triumph.
I use the word “triumph” advisedly, even though there was never a time when Farrell did not have to sweat for his words, or when even his best work did not receive negative reviews. He triumphed in the sense that he never quit writing and never lost control of his life’s ambition or his integrity. This biography honors that effort and redeems even his worst books in the sense that the biographer shows how writing itself was Farrell’s lifeline and worth any amount of abuse critics could hand out.
The trouble was that the novel form did not suit Farrell. He did not have the power to shape his story into a single narrative. His forte was the epic, a series of interconnected narratives portraying the lives of the same characters in the same setting. As his most sympathetic critics noted, Farrell’s authority was cumulative.
The virtue of this biography is that Landers can weave in and out of Farrell’s massive oeuvre to show how the Lonigan and O’Neill novels cohere. To appreciate the Farrell effect, then, one would have to read, at a minimum, three novels (the Lonigan trilogy), and to do real justice to Farrell read another five–the O’Neill series. Critics and reviewers have seldom had the patience to read Farrell as an American Balzac, especially when influential critics of Farrell’s day–like Edmund Wilson and Alfred Kazin –were conspicuously tired of the all-Irish South Side milieu.
To critics enamored of modernism, Farrell’s naturalism seemed stodgy and unsophisticated. To magazines like The New Republic and The Nation, rife with Stalinist critics, Farrell, a Trotskyite, seemed a heretic. Then, after the success of the Studs Lonigan trilogy–hailed mostly as a piece of literary sociology–reviewers became impatient with Farrell’s lengthy and often inelegant books.
Although Landers is Farrell’s champion, he does not deny his subject’s faults or place the blame for his hero’s difficulties solely on the literary or political communities. Reading a Farrell sentence requires an appetite for more wordage than is strictly necessary: “Nothing remained of that past now but scars and wounds, agonies, frustrations, lacerations, sufferings, death.” This verbose and earnest style can be very wearing.
Most scholars would concede Farrell’s historical importance. He was the first American author to portray the life of an ethnic neighborhood with realistic specificity. He avoided the sentimentality of proletarian fiction and gave a clear sense of the language, the prejudices, and the whole gestalt. Farrell inspired writers like Norman Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut to write about classes of characters and groups that had gone largely unrepresented in American literature.
But the impression lingers that Farrell was a sort of inferior Dreiser, his distinguished predecessor in literary naturalism. While both writers stress the way society shapes individuals, Farrell was more concerned with the quality of the minds a given environment produces rather than with the environment itself. There is relatively little physical description in Farrell, of the environment itself, for he was greatly influenced by James Joyce’s stream of consciousness technique, in which the concerns of a society are filtered through individual mentalities.
Nevertheless, Studs Lonigan is clearly kin to Dreiser’s Clyde Griffiths in An American Tragedy (1925), who has the same romantic longings, seeing in Roberta Alden the ideal representation of womanhood that Studs finds in Lucy Scanlon. Both characters are dogged by the same nebulous and unfounded belief in their own greatness, which is their American tragedy. .p Farrell’s achievement is comparable not only to An American Tragedy but also to Huckleberry Finn and to E. L. Doctorow’s Billy Bathgate. All three novels center on young boys who reject schooling, are attracted to romantic or criminal figures, and evolve as complex products of their society’s values even as they apparently rebel against its mores. Each author tries to render American speech realistically, to capture the times their characters inhabit, and to assess the extent to which Americans are capable of achieving the individuality they so prize.
The career of James T. Farrell reminds me of that wonderful sentence in T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent”: “Someone said: ‘The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.’ Precisely, and they are that which we know.”
