Lonigan Redux

An Honest Writer

The Life and Times of James T. Farrell

by Robert K. Landers

Encounter, 562 pp., $28.95

WHAT HAPPENED to James T. Farrell? Once considered one of America’s most promising writers, Chicago’s favorite son was for a time the odds-on favorite to follow Faulkner, Hemingway, and Steinbeck on the road to literary immortality. But by the time he turned sixty, his books had stopped selling and the critics had moved on. Since his death in 1979 Farrell has been little more than a footnote, relegated to the literary backwaters–yet another writer whose name is known in English departments but whose books are seldom read.

The appearance of Farrell’s masterpiece, the Studs Lonigan trilogy, on the Modern Library’s millennial list of the “Best 100 Novels of the Century” was thus a surprise–and though that list was much derided, it nonetheless signaled something of a revival for the author. And now the Library of America’s reprint of the Studs Lonigan trilogy and a new biography, Robert K. Landers’s An Honest Writer: The Life and Times of James T. Farrell, make the case that he deserves not only a critical reappraisal but that rarest of contemporary literary prizes: a popular readership.

Big and brawling with a hard-hitting, exorbitant prose that wavers between the awkwardly prolix and the genuinely compelling, the Studs Lonigan trilogy–Young Lonigan (1932), The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan (1934), and Judgment Day (1935)–is typical of the James T. Farrell literary experience. The trilogy chronicles the life of a young man growing up in an Irish family on Chicago’s South Side from before World War I to Studs’s death during the Depression. Farrell was consumed with portraying Chicago’s streets in those days. Alongside fleeting moments of young love and idyllic scenes of playing football, Studs Lonigan makes his way through a city that frequently seems an American Inferno: smoky pool halls filled with prostitutes; city sidewalks rife with gang wars and race riots; even a brothel where rape, brutality, and venereal disease are featured.

It cannot be said that no tenderness exists in Farrell’s trilogy. Indeed, the early scenes of Studs’s first love and, later, his longing for the “one true girl,” Lucy, make for heartbreaking stuff. Lucy is an unobtainable girl of the lace-curtain Irish, a woman who moves beyond Studs’s social class and romantic hopes. But the world of Studs Lonigan is soaked in booze and blood. In one scene in Judgment Day, the third and strongest novel in the trilogy, Studs goes to the race track after having a spat with his fiancée. There he encounters a married woman who has had a bad day at the races. Along with three other men, Studs accompanies the woman back to her apartment, where she turns tricks to recoup her losses. Such starkness incurred the wrath of critics both high-brow and commercial. Edmund Wilson dismissed Farrell, declaring his characters were “unreflecting and limited people,” while Henry Seidel Canby of the popular Saturday Review called Farrell “unbearably brutal.”

The greatest strengths of Studs Lonigan are inextricably entwined with its weaknesses. Farrell is like a documentary filmmaker who can’t bring himself to cut or even organize the hours upon hours of footage he’s amassed. The reader confronts an unending parade of characters: soliloquizing Catholic priests, flippant thugs, crooked policemen, pool hall brawlers, Jewish bookies, corrupt politicians, seedy stockbrokers, drunken house painters, nosy soda jerks–all rendered in the colloquial lingo of Farrell’s universe. Bent on including everyone in the vast fabric of that time and place, Farrell sacrifices plot and taut narrative drive for completeness. In doing so, he gave American literature a huge unwieldy opus that, despite its flaws, seems to demand entrance into the canon in much the same way that Studs Lonigan demanded entrance into the bordello: with a swagger and a sneer.

ROBERT K. LANDERS’S biography of James T. Farrell offers a vivid portrait of a conflicted artist who throughout his life seemed to be caught between two worlds. At the age of two, young James was given to his mother’s parents, the Dalys, for safekeeping. Farrell’s father, Jim Farrell, was a Chicago teamster who could not afford a proper home for his three children, so James was taken to the Grand Boulevard community where the Dalys lived, a safe, pleasant, middle-class community, four miles south of the Loop. It was here in this conventional middle-class home that James T. Farrell would develop the anti-bourgeoisie impulse that led him to embrace the colorful Irish neighborhood of his birth.

It did not take Farrell long to romanticize these working-class roots. Soon after entering college he began espousing revolutionary politics. In An Honest Writer, Landers gives a moving sketch of Farrell’s intellectual awakening in his first year at the University of Chicago. After an English course exposed him to modern writing, Farrell later said, “I overturned all of the values of my boyhood and became a very rebellious young man. As I did, I came to the conclusion that I did not want to be a success in the usual terms: I did not want to be a Babbitt.”

Before long, Farrell was publishing short stories and articles that featured his signature topic: the harsh, unforgiving landscape of the Irish experience of the South Side. In 1932 Vanguard Press published the first installment of the Studs Lonigan trilogy, Young Lonigan. At this point, Landers’s biography picks up the pace and shows a Farrell caught up in his passions, politics, and literature.

A Trotskyite, Farrell battled more against his fellow leftists than with any capitalists. He let his books of urban desolation, featuring the squalor of the working class, the cultural ignorance of the middle class, and the amorality of the rich, speak for themselves. He viewed his body of work as a Socialist attack on conservative values. But he was far more unforgiving of his leftist comrades from whom he expected more. After Trotsky’s flight from the Soviet Union, Farrell took a visceral stance against Stalin. His glowing review of Max Shactman’s pamphlet Behind the Moscow Trial, which made a case for Trotsky’s innocence while illuminating Stalin’s Machiavellian manipulations of the proceedings, made Farrell numerous enemies among American Communist intellectuals and writers.

Farrell made matters worse by having a few too many drinks and threatening Stalin’s apologists at cocktail parties. As described by Farrell himself when he confronted Communist and cultural commissar Alexander Trachtenberg: “I got Tracty and shook my fist under his nose and taunted him and other Stalinists there, [daring them] to call me a careerist, a person not to be trusted, a derelict etc. to my face.”

As a result, the books he published after the Moscow trials, No Star Is Lost (1938), Father and Son (1940), and My Days of Anger (1943), were panned on two fronts. The more conservative critic Van Wyck Brooks wrote that Farrell and other Socialist authors seemed “to delight in kicking their world to pieces, as if civilization were all a pretense and everything noble a humbug.” Meanwhile, on the left, Nelson Algren was joined by others who were even less complimentary, maligning Farrell’s verbose writing style and his repetitive use of the Irish-American urban experience.

Farrell was not without powerful literary allies. H.L. Mencken came to Farrell’s defense in his inimitable no-nonsense way: “Wonderful stuff in those Chicago tales…whoever doesn’t like Farrell is an idiot or a liar. Farrell refused to go along with Stalin’s boys, and as a critic he took a fall out of new authors they were bringing up. So they ganged him.”

LANDERS HANDLES THE FINAL EPISODES of Farrell’s life with sensitivity and respect, revealing the author’s long, slow slide into obscurity. His literary agent, Sterling Lord, dropped him, as much for his cocktail-party shenanigans and paranoid behavior as for his declining literary influence. With his personal life in shambles, having two failed marriages behind him, Farrell became increasingly dependent upon amphetamines. But he never stopped writing, publishing his last novel, The Death of Nora Ryan (1978), at the age of seventy-four, one year before his death.

James T. Farrell was a writer for whom the creative process was not so much art as act of will. Despite his matter-of-fact prose style, the energy and depth with which he delineated the experiences of his youth invested his novels with a cumulative power. Never bowing to public opinion or popular sentiment, Farrell was a writer with unyielding passion, an author who fought to write one true story.

Cortright McMeel is a writer in Baltimore.