James T. Farrell Needs Saving? 8-16

 I started this back in August but I must admit most of the actual reading was on October 16, 2021. Just me being confessional.

I seem to recall the Studs Lonigan mini-series but do not recall watching it. Yet from there I learned the name of Studs Lonigan. Somewhere I connected Lonigan with James T. Farrell. While in prison, having decided to fill in the holes of my education in literature, I decided to read the Studs Lonigan trilogy. I accomplished this thanks to the inter-library program.

I wrote notes of my reading and will hope to have them online here in the future. Let say I was impressed with Farrell more than I was with Lonigan. This might be a case of an unappealing protagonist. He is neither Hemingway or Fitzgerald but neither is he Theodore Dreiser or Sinclair Lewis. I suggest reading a trilogy with the leading character who is a jerk says something about the quality of an author's writing.

Secondly, Farrell is a Chicago writer. Enough of one to be in the Chicago Hall of Fame. This makes him a Midwestern writer, which makes him of interest to me. 

Third, I have been John Dos Passos' USA Trilogy for the past month. Farrell was a Leftist; a real one, not what our modern day Republicans call a leftist. Dos Passos also writes about such Leftists.

Farrell wrote and published fiction steadily during these years, arguing that there is an interdependency between the advancement of culture and the struggle for human liberation, although Farrell's fiction differed from that of John Dos Passos, who wrote explicitly political novels. Some of Farrell's work, such as his antifascist novelette Tommy Gallagher's Crusade (1939), dramatized important political issues, but his Studs Lonigan trilogy demonstrated that he was primarily a novelist of human character. Farrell was acutely sensitive to the psychological costs of living in a class society, and his conceptions of individual consciousness and social destiny were infused with a materialist outlook. This is most evident not only in the Studs Lonigan trilogy, but also in Farrell's second series, the O'Neill-O'Flaherty pentalogy: A World I Never Made (1936), No Star Is Lost (1938), Father and Son (1940), My Days of Anger (1943), and The Face of Time (1953). Although the pentalogy centers around the life of Danny O'Neill, Farrell preferred that the five books be called the "O'Neill-O'Flaherty series" because the main characters are derived from both families. Both the Studs Lonigan trilogy and also the O'Neill-O'Flaherty series, conceived about the same time and thematically interconnected, provide an expose of the false consciousness created by the institutions of capitalist society. A third series, the Bernard Carr trilogy�consisting of Bernard Claer (1946), The Road Between (1949), and Yet Other Waters (1952) -- evolved somewhat later but was still linked to the revolutionary Marxist period in Farrell's literary development.

REVOLUTIONARY NOVELIST IN CRISS(sic)

And what I have learned is that Farrell was a good enough writer that he should not be so neglected nowadays. Charles Fanning titled his article for Bridgewater Review Rediscovering James T. Farrell (wherein he makes a good case for such a rediscovery). The Modern Novel makes comments on the three novels of the Lonigan Trilogy (and only those novels); the following comes from the analysis of the trilogy's last novel, Judgment Day:

But it is Chicago that is almost as interesting as Studs. The change in the neighbourhoods, with immigration, is a key theme and one which drives the racism. Portraits of the unemployed during the Depression, marches, bank collapses and the anti-Hoover feeling are all vividly portrayed. And, with two heroes, you definitely feel that you are getting your money’s worth in what is an underappreciated work of American literature.

Along similar lines I offer WRITERS, RELATIVES LOOK ANEW AT JAMES FARRELL'S `STUDS LONIGAN' :

By his own testimony, Branch, who's also a Mark Twain specialist, is almost alone among scholars and critics in his belief that Farrell deserves resurrecting. "I've thought for some time that he was overdue, but nothing's happened. That's why I was glad I could get this little book published, hoping it would help.

"But it seems to me that these revivals come very, very late for writers," Branch added. "Take the case of Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson. Right now, scholars are finding more and more neglected writers. Eventually, there'll come a time when Jim Farrell gets his proper due."

A big reason Farrell hasn't gotten it already, Branch said, is that "he's been dumped on by so many schools of critics: Marxists, Catholics, formalist academics who prefer Henry James' writing." The neglect is such that the only Farrell book in print, among the more than 50 he published, is the Lonigan trilogy, available in a "Prairie State" edition from the University of Illinois Press.

According to Branch, Farrell has been mistakenly devalued as a mechanical photorealist, a compulsive overwriter whose novels, composed at top speed in a torrential, reportorial prose, are socio-anthropological casebooks rather than imaginative works of psychological literature. "One critic compared him to a war correspondent, who went out into the front-line trenches with a tape-recorder, which is ridiculous. There's a great deal of invention in his writing."

In the Lonigan trilogy, Farrell's seemingly turgid, longwinded style, Branch asserted, was "a very deliberate and meticulous attempt to get a language that would convey Studs' consciousness. Farrell could write, and did write, in many other styles, but this particular objective one was extremely well suited to what he was trying to achieve, and it's one of the glories of the trilogy."

This comes from Jim Burns' James T. Farrell:

Writers frequently suffer from the vagaries of fashion and it's not unusual for a novelist to be forgotten within a few years of his death. In James T. Farrell's case it would seem that the collapse of his reputation has been almost complete, and it's probably only in a few universities, mostly in the United States, that his name now evokes any interest. And yet, at one time, his novels and short stories were easily available in both hardback and paperback editions and he was often mentioned alongside Wolfe, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner, and other leading American authors. That Farrell’s standing has declined so much is curious and invites at least a brief examination of his work.

***

If the kind of political fiction I’ve referred to does have its limitations then it may be that Farrell's reputation will have to rest on the novels and stories which deal with Studs Lonigan, Danny O'Neill, and the Irish-American world of Chicago in the first thirty or so years of this century. His rites of passage explorations move around this landscape, recording everything in vivid detail. And, contrary to many assumptions, it's not necessarily the slum neighbourhoods which are described. When he later wrote about how he had conceived Studs Lonigan, Farrell was careful to point out that he had deliberately set the book in a relatively-affluent area where people had steady jobs and owned their own houses, so that he could avoid a kind of vulgar economic determinism which would make Stud's downfall easily explainable. He was enough of a Marxist to suggest that the onset of the Depression hastened his decline by wiping out his savings and destroying his job, but he said that personal failings had started the slide as Studs drank, gambled, ran with gangs, and generally gave himself up to the life of the streets. What Farrell was getting at was the way in which social conformity - the pressure to go with the crowd, agree with the group, and subjugate the sensitive side of one's personality in favour of a rough macho image - could destroy an individual. When he wrote his Danny O'Neill novels, which roughly parallel Studs Lonigan in their time-sequence, his central character found a way out of the restrictive cultural environment, just as Farrell himself had done. The world he described may be a specific one, and its surface details consequently dated, but the situations evoked are still very real today.

Might politics explain Farrell's fall from literary grace? It was for Nelson Algren and for John Dos Passos. 

Another explanation could be his interest in working people. My friend K complains about MFA writers and his complaint may be relevant here. How many of our current writers know the working class? Of those those who do find have such knowledge, what interest do they have in writing about working people? .

And let me not let the readers off the hook. Publishers will not buy what they cannot sell and what do the readers of Jonathan Lethem or Jonathan Franzen care about the lives of those poorer, working jobs for the minimum wage? I have answered this for my own writing in the negative. I suspect this divide might also have expression in our current American political divide.

If we read writers like Farrell and Algren and Dos Passos out of the American canon, we distort the meaning of American literature. We may even distort the meaning of America.

THE RETURN OF STUDS LONIGAN by Bette Howland is a reappraisal of Studs Lonigan and Farrell:

It’s no secret that Farrell came to resent the success of the Studs Lonigan trilogy. Over the course of his long and amazingly productive career, all his other work would be measured against it. The Danny O’Neill series, Bernard Clare ; the novels of the Universe of Time; volumes of short stories, journalism, literary criticism; his steady and persistent portrayal of “the American way of life” through the lives he knew so well. He became a writer taken for granted; he wrote “too much.” (Those thick glasses”crystal balls in his old age”weren’t props; he was driven in part by fear of going blind.) His own favorite novel was his last, the deeply personal Invisible Swords ; but by then not many were paying attention. In the final months of his life, Farrell was signing copies of a new edition of the trilogy for the publisher: another autograph, another dollar. He needed the money. At the same time a television miniseries was portraying Studs, yet again, as the movie tough guy he so longed to be. Fifty-some books on the shelves, and Farrell remained the author of Studs Lonigan.

Howland includes a comparison with Theodore Dreiser: 

Farrell was not a lesser Dreiser. He never considered himself, as so many critics have, a disciple, and except in his own gloomier moods didn’t agree with Dreiser’s ideas. (Luckily, Dreiser didn’t always agree with his own ideas himself.) Farrell never lost his sense of having to put up a fight, to define himself against . This came with being a writer “of plebeian origin”:

He sees things from the outside, not the inside . . . .His subject is his own world around him . . . .The feelings of alienation he meets sometimes make him hardened, stubborn and resistant. He spends his youth in struggling to get what a son of Groton acquires as if by natural right.

A son of Groton might have his own ups and downs, but the issue here is legitimation. “Dreiser had to plead his case as a writer,” Farrell wrote. “Just as he had to discover for himself, so his sympathetic readers similarly had to discover.” Dreiser gave Farrell permission”this is what one writer can do for another. It was a spiritual debt, and Farrell passed it on.

You can make your own decision, Google Books has Studs Lonigan online here.

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