SOURCE: "The Literary Record," in James T. Farrell: The Revolutionary Socialist Years, New York University Press, 1978, pp. 132-43.

[In this excerpt, Wald contends that Farrell's political concerns are a significant aspect of his work.]

The clearest manifestations of [Leon] Trotsky's impact on Farrell were inspirational and political; but there was a special bond in their mutual search for "new perspectives" for Marxist writers and intellectuals. As a novelist, Farrell emerged from the 1920s looking favorably upon the literary tradition of modern realism and naturalism; but as an intellectual, with a wide-ranging knowledge of history and philosophy, he condemned the limited vistas of Dreiser, Anderson, and others. Originally, Farrell advanced beyond these other writers in his assimilation of the pragmatic social philosophy and psychology of Dewey and Mead. Like the New York intellectuals around Partisan Review, Farrell believed in the necessity of literary as well as Marxist tradition; and unlike Max Eastman, and many in the Stalinist school of the early 1930s, Farrell accepted the 1920s revolution in technique and sensibility (although he found it inadequate for the 1930s).

Drawn initially to ideals he mistakenly associated with the Stalinist movement, Farrell felt a visceral disgust with the Communists' literary politics and began to forge a critique. Gradually, as in the case of other theoretically oriented intellectuals of an independent mind and revolutionary outlook, he came to prefer the critique that Trotsky had evolved of Stalinist policy: It provided greater depth, breadth, and the authenticity of being espoused by a genuine revolutionary leader. . . .

It has been affirmed that Farrell's world of fictional creation in the 1930s and 1940s was imaginatively created primarily from the experiences of his childhood—especially from his observation of the social forces involved in the fall of Studs Lonigan types, as well as from his comprehension of the ordeal requisite for escape from the cultural shackles which victimized the O'Neill and O'Flaherty (Farrell and Daly) families. Farrell was brooding over and formulating the underlying concepts of his first two major cycles of novels in the late 1920s. Had Farrell succumbed, like so many other young plebeian writers, to the pressures of Stalinism or commercialism during the early 1930s, it is doubtful that either the Studs Lonigan trilogy would have been completed, or the O'Neill-O'Flaherty series ever written; for, as has been shown, these works were undertaken in defiance of the Stalinist line, government and local censors, and popular taste. Although Farrell's central literary projects were grounded in the 1920s, it is justifiable to assert that his gravitation toward Trotskyism was one important aid which assisted him in standing fast against currents which could have undermined the realization of his goals in fiction during the thirties and forties.

Trotskyism gave Farrell, the author of fiction, a revolutionary perspective for the sustenance of his art. The qualities Farrell came to admire the most in Trotsky—his faith in his ideas, his willingness to stand alone in defiance of Stalinism and capitalism—were those which nourished Farrell in his own struggles. Farrell's fight to keep art free from various forms of dictatorial and commercial corruption was as firm as Trotsky's resolution to liberate the revolutionary workers' movement from Stalinism. Farrell's search for truth in the Moscow Trials, and his willingness to face it, stemmed from the same urge which drove him to ruthlessly probe the world of Danny O'Neill.

But in addition to this general impact of Trotsky on the course of Farrell's fiction, it would be hard to imagine that Farrell's intense involvement with Trotsky (the man and his ideas), his impassioned defense of Trotsky, his thorough reading and re-reading of Trotsky's major works, his immersion in the milieu of Trotskyist and left-wing anti-Stalinists, his political battles against the Popular Front from a Trotskyist perspective, his adherence to the Trotskyist conception of the struggle against fascism—that all this could have passed without some specific observable impact on Farrell's fiction. And, of course, the evidence is there.

If one surveys the large quantity of Farrell's fiction which concerns radical intellectuals and particularly the Stalinist movement, there is one overriding characteristic: the conception of Stalinism, with its cultural arm, as a deforming and perfidious social movement. V. F. Calverton noted the absence of this approach in A Note on Literary Criticism; Farrell's polemic, Calverton had argued, seemed to be mainly against the ignorance of various Communist party critics. However, if the Trotskyist notion of Stalinism remained undiscussed in A Note on Literary Criticism for tactical reasons, the situation was soon reversed. In the following months and years Farrell demonstrated no lack of aggressiveness in promoting a Trotskyist understanding of political and cultural Stalinism in its Third Period, Popular Front, wartime, and post-Browder phases. (It was precisely this kind of incisive political critique which made Farrell anathema to the Stalinists and to those liberals who chose to ally with them.) And to some degree, Trotskyist critiques of the phases of Stalinism are concepts underlying parts of two novels (The Road Between and Yet Other Waters), scores of short stories, and one important play, The Mowbray Family.

Farrell's fictional world of the Stalinist political-cultural movement is not peopled with simple scoundrels, conspirators, or especially naive or warped individuals (although some of these types are present). As a social force, Stalinism is portrayed as a magnet of attraction, offering (in its different periods) combinations of material and spiritual rewards. In the beginning of Yet Other Waters (depicting Stalinism in transition from the Third Period to the Popular Front), novelist Bernard Carr and Mel Morris (the editor of Social Theatre) have a revealing discussion. Mel, to whom the party has given a magazine and an audience, sings praises to what the Stalinists have done for him in a very material sense:

"Look how we've both got ahead already," Mel went on. "We're going places. And the Movement's going places. After the Writers Congress next month, Bernie, there's going to be nothing to stop us in American culture. You remember how we both came to New York a few years ago, poor and unknown, without a pot to piss in?"

The pull and appeal of the Communist movement is described in other Farrell stories, such as "John Hitchcock," which treats a starving book reviewer attracted as well as repelled by the movement:

Many writers . . . had gone left. In the circles in which he moved, Marxism, Revolution, the Communist Party, were constant subjects of loud discussion. . . . Few of those who participated in these discussions were well read in Marxism; few knew the history of the Russian Revolution; and the level of the discussions was generally rigid, sloganistic. The Communists and fellow travelers who defended the Party line consistently spoke with great confidence and self-assurance, with, literally, the conceit of history in their voices. . . . Most of them were in circumstances essentially similar to those in which John found himself. They were declassed intellectuals. They wanted to be writers, critics, employees in publishing houses, figures in the literary life of New York. Times were bad, very bad in the publishing business. America was in the depths of the Hoover era. There was widespread unemployment. There were riots, starvation, hunger marches. American economy was shaken. The future looked miserable. The declassed intellectuals were insecure, shaky, worried. They did not know where to turn. The effort to survive harried them, warped their character. Communists and fellow travelers spoke to them with assurance and self-confidence, convinced that they were absolutely right.

Fear and insecurity made them more susceptible to the pull; there was also idealism—the kind of idealism which moved Bernard Carr during the 1927 Sacco-Vanzetti demonstration (and which he tended to associate with the Communists). As Farrell later wrote: "Stalinism was . . . a house of cultural assignation, where one guy could get two girls for the night, the glamour girl of success, and poor little Nell, the beautiful but ragged proletarian girl of integrity" [unpublished manuscript, Farrell Collection]. Yet, as Farrell's stories reveal—and as the record authenticates—for most of the plebeian writers the success was short-lived. Many pro-Stalinists (such as Henry Roth, Robert Cantwell, Jack Conroy, Clara Weatherwax, Leane Zugsmith, Edwin Seaver, Isadore Schneider, Mike Gold, Edwin Rolfe, and Edward Newhouse) ended up writing little fiction, and much of that was soon forgotten. And, like many other characters in Farrell's stories, his literary representations of these pro-Stalinist writers end up as middle-aged men with lost dreams.

Intellectuals who gravitated toward the Trotskyists tended to write fiction about themselves, their group and its problems, frequently in the form of romans à clef. Max Eastman's Venture, Edmund Wilson's I Thought of Daisy, Tess Slesinger's The Unpossessed, Mary McCarthy's The Oasis, are a few examples. And Farrell is no exception to the trend, especially inasmuch as The Road Between and Yet Other Waters are peopled with an abundance of figures from the radical literary movement. Some of these characters operate in other fiction as well, with the same or similar names. The degree of the portrait's accuracy seems to fall into one of three categories: the recreation of a person in full detail; the creation of characters who simply make statements or perform acts once carried out by an actual person; the depiction of composite or hybrid figures.

Jake (a recurring figure in several stories) is extremely suggestive of Joseph Freeman, especially in his attempts to hold dissident fellow travelers together by criticizing the Communist party's sectarianism in private. (In fact, like the Freeman observed in Farrell's diary, Jake even praises Trotsky in secret.) Certainly the short story "The Dialectic," which embodies a Trotskyist critique of the affinity of liberalism and Stalinism in the late 1930s, features a character very much like Joe Freeman. The story tells of two young students who became radicalized in the early 1930s. Jake is an admirer of Trotsky and Eddie seeks to emulate John Reed. Jake, however, joins the Communist party and a decade later is forced to suppress his real views in regard to Trotsky and the Moscow Trials (as was Freeman). Eddie, in contrast, goes to Moscow as a correspondent, becomes disillusioned, returns to the United States, and is treated as an outcast by the Stalinists. But in a dialectical reversal at the end of the story, Jake is expelled by the Communists and Eddie becomes one of their allies in the Popular Front. . . .

"The Martyr" is more authentically a story of its time (the midforties). It demonstrates the profound emptiness of the lives of the men from the Communist literary milieu. A fictionalized account of the famous post-Browder literary dispute in the Communist party, it tells of Leonard Luckman, a thinly disguised Albert Maltz, who returns to New York after six years in Hollywood. At age forty, he makes an ill-fated attempt to change the literary policy of the Communist party that he once helped forge but now feels has sterilized his literary work. With keen psychological insight, Farrell probes the convoluted logic of self-deception by which the characters justify their own self-betrayals.

It was frequently because of their approach to character development that Farrell judged novels of the pro-Stalinist writers to be shallow; no doubt Farrell felt drawn to and was influenced by Trotsky on a literary plane because of the marvelous character portraits contained in The History of the Russian Revolution. Of these, Farrell once wrote [in Partisan Review, Vol. 7, September-October, 1940]:

He [Trotsky] saw in everyone the representative of a class or of a social group, and in everyone's ideas he perceived their political consequences. His estimates of character, despite the charges of his critics, were generally not personal: they were political and intellectual. His brilliant character vignettes in The History of the Russian Revolution are actually social studies in miniature.

Although the class differences of characters—for example, in the O'Neill-O'Flaherty books, Jim O'Neill, the worker, and Al O'Flaherty, the salesman—were in the material itself, Trotsky's approach may have helped Farrell make full use of all possibilities. The crowning achievement was probably Farrell's magnificent portrait of his father, represented by Jim O'Neill, as the embodiment of the American working man in Father and Son.

Additionally, since Farrell was a novelist of character, the nature of the Communist movement was also revealed in Farrell's fiction by the way it attracted and shaped character. Some of Farrell's best literary portraits feature this concern: especially that of Norman Griel in "Victim or Hero?", a careful representation of a journalist (again, suggestive of a real figure) pulled into the Stalinist movement. Griel suppresses his doubts about the Moscow Trials and tries to escape his deteriorating personal life through a trip to Spain (during the Civil War). There he is accidentally killed, having been propelled into the situation by a destiny almost (but not totally) beyond his control.

"Breakfast" is a character sketch of Arthur Stein, who sneers at bourgeois culture and clings to a notion of Marxism as the "locomotive of history." "A Story About Money" is another portrayal, although cruder, of a wealthy cultural dilettante who ends up in the Communist party.

Other stories tend to reflect concerns of those in the anti-Communist left. "Comrade Stanley" focusses on the intrigue and factional mentality of the Communist movement. "A Love Story of Our Time," similar to Dos Passos's Adventures of a Young Man, exhibits a young anticapitalist poet literally seduced into going to Spain, only to discover the true treacherous role of the Stalinists there and be denounced.

Farrell's attitude after the forties toward the Trotskyist movement—a hostile one in most of his published fiction—is concentrated in a group of five stories (in addition to the appearance of Joseph Benton in "Tom Carroll"). Some of this work consists of character likenesses: for example, "The Mayor's Committee," in which the clever, witty, and somewhat shallow narrator suggests Max Shachtman, and "Episodes of a Return," in which Albert Goldman may have been the model for the tired exradical and former Smith Act victim. "Digging Our Graves" is a bitter satire about the impotence of a squabbling, sectarian left, with swipes at James Cannon (probably suggested by the figure described as "the Lenin of America if he hadn't drunk whiskey") and Dwight Macdonald (the likely point of reference in "The Yale man's moral resolution").

The most extensive fictional critique of the Trotskyist movement is "The Renegade." It is the story of Hal, an arrogant unattractive person who breaks with the Communists almost accidentally and gravitates toward Trotskyism. There he is taken under the wing of the party's philosopher (reputed to be a budding David Ryazanov), Joseph Zinn, whose party name is "Benton." (This is the same name as that of the character resembling George Novack in "Tom Carroll," and is also meant to be a fictional portrait of Farrell's one-time friend. Patrick Nolan suggests James Cannon, and certain of Hal's experiences may have been inspired by Felix Morrow, although Hal seems much more of a composite figure than the other two.) Hal is impressed by the Trotskyists' righteous talk about the integrity of their party, and their claim to be "the only moral people."

Under the supervision of Benton—a man perpetually on the alert for potentially dangerous scratches and infections which can lead to political gangrene—Hal rises to the position of a party journalist. He quits college and joins the small group of dull, unimaginative, but courageous and hard-working members. However, at the end of the story, again almost accidentally, Hal discovers himself to be a leading member of an opposition group and, although he recants, he is expelled by Benton. "The Renegade" is a hostile literary reaction against the factional struggles of the Trotskyist movement, which had irked Farrell at least since the time of the imbroglio in the Socialist party. But the unkind portraits of Novack and Cannon introduce an element of subjective personal bitterness that is rare even in Farrell's most autobiographical fiction, and is an index of the deep wound left by his disillusionment with the Trotskyist movement.

With the exception of Tommy Gallagher's Crusade, the collection When Boyhood Dreams Come True (1946) is probably the book of fiction most overtly reflective of Farrell's positive attitude toward the Trotskyists before his break with them. This is especially evidenced in the play contained in the book, "The Mowbray Family." Here, in contrast to Yet Other Waters, we have anti-Stalinism combined with a radical alternative. In this three-act comedy (written with Hortense Farrell), the wealthy home of the Mowbrays has become filled with a gallery of Stalinists from the Popular Front movement, because of the foolish gullibility of Mrs. Mowbray. The play contains excellent social-political likenesses of all the types attracted to the Stalinist-liberal enterprise: Mortimer, the Lost Generation poet of patrician character who is revered because he, for one, is now "doing" something besides just "talking"; Sandy Warren, a hardboiled Communist party journalist; Eric, a tortured middle-class writer.

However, counterposed to this morass is Philip Bentley, a disciple of John Dewey and a philosophy instructor, who is anticapitalist, revolutionary, but opposed to the totalitarian features of Stalinism and who predicts the Hitler-Stalin Pact. (The Pact occurs at the climax of the play when it is announced over the radio.) Philip seems a positive force, and he is clearly a Trotskyist intellectual, although not an orthodox Marxist (Farrell, in fact, makes Philip a conscious opponent of dialectical materialist philosophy, and attributes to the Stalinist, Mortimer, a speech on dialectics similar to Trotsky's brief treatment in "The ABC of Dialectical Materialism") [When Boyhood Dreams Come True].

Farrell's short fiction is also permeated with representations of other social types cast up by the radical movement, including the exiled left-wing Social Democrat from Spain in "Man on an Island of History"; the narrow politico, "Dumbrovic"; the ex-Stalinists in "The Lady and the Masters of History"; the former labor radicals in "Reunion Abroad." The most explicitly revolutionary of all Farrell's short works is "Summer Morning in Dublin." This is reportage of the first order, in the 1930s genre, and ends with a revolutionary summons (after a survey of Dublin's brutal poverty): ". . . the only alternative is for all workers to rise up and seize power themselves."

Especially when Farrell is compared to other American realists like Dreiser, his work shows indications of an international and historical consciousness which Trotsky's Marxism may have partially inspired and partially broadened. In a taped interview with David Madden, Farrell emphasized the importance of the first World War at the beginning of the second volume of the Studs Lonigan books, an event which resulted in an "unsure moral consciousness" after its occurrence. Apparently an important conception underlying Farrell's forthcoming book How Our Day Began (of which some excerpts have been published), is the worldshaking opening of what Lenin deemed "the imperialist epoch" of war and revolution, in 1914:

We were born the same year and, thus, we can say that we are of the same generation and have felt some of the same general pressures of history on our own lives. Our characters, our minds, our feelings, have grown, developed, evolved within the field where these pressures are at work. You are Dutch and Jewish and were born in Amsterdam, and I am American and Irish, and was born in Chicago. We are children of the twentieth century, but we were born before the twentieth century became fully what it is. In 1914, this century exploded in its own face, and ever since it has been face-lifting and doctoring itself, and seeking to develop a better mirror in order that it may see its own reflected image more clearly.

["How Our Day Began," The Smith, Vol. 3, February 15, 1968]

Nevertheless, it is not the argument of this book that Farrell's outlook derives from a single source of influence—be it a man like Trotsky, a historic movement like socialism, or a liberal philosophy like pragmatism. Rather, what has been demonstrated is how Farrell's social, moral, and political concerns not only underlie much of his fiction but also how they are expressed in his fiction—sometimes more directly than at other times. A comprehensive and judicious assessment of Farrell's contributions to American letters is thus impossible without taking into account his long and intense involvement with Marxism and Trotskyism. If Farrell's work had been exclusively provincial rather than intertwined with political events of the day (even, in some instances, virtually rotating around international events), then one might be justified in ignoring the relationship between Farrell's literary output and his involvement with Trotsky and revolutionary Marxism. But Farrell's work is not provincial—nor divorced from his Marxist experience.