James T. Farrell

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James T. Farrell: Two Twilight Images

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In the excerpt below, O'Malley argues that Farrell's fictional world is unremittingly bleak and spiritually degenerate, the result of a decayed civilization and an impoverished Catholicism.
SOURCE: "James T. Farrell: Two Twilight Images," in Fifty Years of the American Novel: A Christian Appraisal, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1952, pp. 237-56.

The fiction of Farrell is likely to bring immediately to mind a well-known figure imagined by the literary historian Taine: in this figure men are seen as field-mice being trampled to death by elephant herds, which portray the brutal forces of nature and civilization. Surely the people who stir about in Farrell's books seem as weak and small and helpless as field-mice, crushed in fear, blinded by poverty and debased by their own wild, unbridled instincts (instincts vaster than will or mind or soul, it would appear) and by the impact of a dark, dangerous, industrial and commercial civilization. In this respect, the work of Farrell draws us back to such nineteenth-century writers as Zola, the Goncourt brothers and George Gissing (a kind of Victorian Farrell)—to mention but a few—writers who took experience not from the salons of the old world but, one might say, from the sewers of the new.

Yet it is understandable that the plight of man in an urbanized, industrialized civilization could scarcely have been ignored, that the sensibilities of serious artists would have been lacerated by the very life they experienced, that they would have to incorporate it into their fictions. This is a most unhappy, sad, suffering civilization—and writers, in the face and feeling of it, could not be expected to show themselves as sentimentalists or optimists. That they should have become materialists or Marxists or naturalists is no matter for wonder, for they were the heirs and products and observers of a highly secularized civilization, in which the destruction of faith and of the traditional philosophical and theological sources of value had been all but accomplished. They lived—and they made clear that they lived—in the twilight of civilization.

It is abundantly clear that Farrell, whether he be described as naturalist or materialist, is important for his expression of his sense of the twilight of civilization. This is what comes out most lavishly and painfully in his stories and novels: he offers a gruesome image of civilization—and within that civilization he establishes another image, his image of the Catholic Church, or rather of the Church as affected by the particular circumstances and pressures of modern, urban, secular existence. . . .

Here and there in his work Farrell betokens at least a faint sort of sentimental primitivism—in delineating the plight of his people of the cities, struggling to be human again, his people of the vacuum, sucked out and dehumanized by their endurance in civilization. For example, in the short story, "The Benefits of American Life" (Guillotine Party, 1935), the sturdy Greek shepherd boy who comes to America and "that tremendous paradise known as Chicago," becomes a dance-marathoner, winning the super-marathon for a prize of five thousand dollars only to ruin his health in the strain of the contest. And the prize-money is used, on his return to Greece, to pay for his remnant of life, "with his lungs rotting away on him," in a tuberculosis resort of his native mountains. Farrell would here suggest, I think, the virtues of the simpler, humbler, more primitive life as opposed to life in the urban American civilized paradise. So he allows his lonely Greek boy in the huge city to remember "his homeland and his Grecian mountain" and "the long, slow days with the sheep."

In another story, "Clyde" (Calico Shoes, 1934), a drugstore clerk is sketched off as having entered willingly into "the alienness of the enormous city, sentimentalizing his determination to fight out its loneliness." But his pointof-view alters, since in the strange, sprawling city he is stifled. There is no community among men, none of the really human contacts he longs for; he suffers from the disease of homelessness: "The unconcern of the crowds, the impermanence of the acquaintanceships he formed, the crushing noise, the shouts of a ceaseless, merciless dollar struggle, all attacked his dazed nerves and his bucolic naiveté." Farrell shows him as yearning for home, for "that lazy, dead, Indiana village" where he had once known certainty of life and where he did have a sense of belonging:

His imagination repeatedly fixed and caressed images of his beloved Indiana earth, beloved earth and foliage and woods withering through remembered but dimming distances. At home there, life, the universe, all those images, objects, associations and events which adolescence links into the abstraction called life, had seemed friendly, saturated with amiability. Back in Indiana, everything, even stray stones, seemed to have had personality to the young man, Clyde—as he recalled them in his urban isolation.

[The] Church is, as I have said, his second persistent—and maybe his more significant—image. The Church, as Farrell presents it, . . . is a dreary, sentimental and shapeless refuge for the impoverished or empty-headed superstitious; it swirls in and out of the chaos of life and degradation and death in which his characters move. But it has no real relevance for their lives: the characters recollect the dreadful catechetical lessons dinned into their brains, grim lessons of sin and hell and damnation; they are exposed to the vulgar-orotund and slick-dogmatic sermons; they swoon through the indulgence of the sweetest minor pieties and berate themselves, in maudlin conscience-pangs, for their prurient offenses against the law, the law from which they are never delivered by love or the faintest intimation thereof. Their highly-individualistic religious experience is part of their own terrible isolation within the dark world.

Altogether in Farrell's work religion, lacking any genuine dynamic, any genuine entrance into the lives of the people, is just an inconsequential retreat from discomfort and noise, despair and poverty: "And it was so quiet in the church . . . Ah, how pretty a thing Mary was"; and the eyes of the petitioner become "glued in fascination on the Italian features of the statue, the large red lips . . . the lovely reddish blush of the cheeks."

While the religious propulsion of Farrell's male characters appears to have as its highest goal the complacent security of membership in the "Order of Christopher," the religious drive of his female characters is towards satiation in what can only be called novena-antics: Lizz O'Neill, for example, turned in upon herself as she is, is expert in such things. But Farrell is nowhere more outrageous in the cast-irony of his treatment of religious experience than in the low-grade short story, "Two Sisters" (Guillotine Party).

Here the two harridans meet after attending Mass in St. Clement's Church: midway in their indecent barging and quarrelling, one of them expatiates on the virtues of devotion to the "Little Rose of Jesus Christ," on the advantages of joining the Society dedicated to her and on the wonders she would work for the members. Devotion to other saints, she piously and placidly avers, had fine results, too: praying to St. Anthony, for instance, for lost letters; to St. Joseph for domestic tranquillity; to St. Rita for the relief of colds, and so on. Still, she assures her sister, for any unusual crisis, no saint could compare with the "Little Rose." At the story's end, after the lascivious bitterness between the sisters has passed, they go out to the Shrine of St. Jude, who, it is opined, is quite powerful—and remain there praying until the janitor sends them along by locking up the church: "They parted in good spirits, agreeing to meet and make the novena to the Little Rose which was commencing on the following Tuesday."

This story is, even for Farrell, exceptionally tasteless, coarse—in theme, style and execution—and it is a vast distance removed from the spirit and style of a story by James Joyce which it brings to mind, at least because of a similarity of titles: "The Sisters," from Dubliners, a story cheerless enough in atmosphere but told with such kindness and with such fineness of perception and feeling as to make Farrell's oppressive coarseness and critical realism all the more repugnant.

It is true, as Robert Morss Lovett, Farrell's great mentor, has said, that Farrell in his short stories is capable of pathos as well as irony. It is also true that Farrell has written a number of fine stories. But I think that it is an extremity of exaggeration or mistaken enthusiasm to suggest, as Lovett does, that Farrell's short stories have serious blood-relationship with those of Joyce in Dubliners. Any "family" resemblance that exists must be coincidental, flimsy, superficial. Farrell, we know, has unstinting admiration for Joyce and has undoubtedly borrowed from Joyce (as he has from Proust), notably the technique of dream-streaming.

Even so, Farrell's admiration for and use of Joyce (whose naturalism is subordinated and transmuted) do not dislodge the fact that Joyce is, in essence and in effect, a writer entirely different from Farrell. Joyce is inseeing, subtle, incessantly compassionate. His humor for men and their errant ways is cosmical, Dantesque. Contrastingly, the spleen of Farrell is often narrow, odd, viscous, perverse and unnecessary, bearing some relation to that of the anonymous vagrant who inscribes the soul's putrescence among the exudations of a filthy urinal wall. In dealing with the Irish Catholics of his short stories, Joyce is incapable of Farrell's too frequently raw and resentful excrescences; nor is he ever ready to heap Farrell's verminous indignities upon the humanity of his sinners, of his low Christians in civilization. . . .

Now it may be true that Farrell, in his time and place, has discerned and been dismayed by some of the worst features of Catholic life in America—sentimentalism, Jansenism and sectarianism—features which have made even the staunchest and most knowing Catholic minds shudder. These are the conditions that once appalled the young James Joyce among the Dublin Irish and which contributed to his, no less than to Farrell's, rejection of the Church. But Joyce never lost his feeling for the Church, despite his apostasy (his profound interest in the liturgy, for instance, remained throughout his books and throughout his life). Joyce's Stephen assures himself: "In temper and mind you are still a Catholic. Catholicism is in your blood"; and his friend Cranly remarks: "It is a curious thing . . . how your mind is supersaturated with the religion in which you say you disbelieve."

Farrell's preoccupation with the Church . . . repellent, harsh, bold, without any of the tenderness of the Joycean sense of the inner strength and deep rhythm of the Church's life. The human beings of the Church in the dark and imperfect city, whether Dublin or Chicago, cannot help being tainted, tormented and distorted by the earthy conditions of their existence. Farrell, however, could not realize that "Catholics are not Catholicism" that the integrity of the Church's ministry, of its dogma, moral code and ritual is in no way whatsoever diminished by particular, local circumstances or by the defalcations of particular Catholics.

Farrell's Catholics, then, are as degenerate as the civilization about them. And their physical and social poverty is as great and piercing and demoralizing as their spiritual poverty: "Silently, he cursed. He glanced around at his ragged children, from face to face, at his wife, at the gleaming kerosene lamp. He god-damned his poverty, the poverty that had robbed him of one son. God, would he ever break through it into something better?" Totally unlike Dostoevski or Bloy, Farrell does not have the Christian's or the Church's insight into the meaning and dignity of poverty. He does not provide, as Bloy does, his wretched poor with any chance to arrive at their meaning: poverty is simply a terror, a disease and a curse, and its victims are not allowed their proper illumination as "God's legitimate heirs." That the Saviour, in Bloy's phrasing, "wanted preeminently to be called Poor man and the God of the poor" is no part of Farrell's wisdom or of the wisdom of his creations. There is only bitterness minus any vestige of nobility in the hearts of Farrell's blighted Catholic poor.

And Farrell's social thought and action are merely humanitarian and Utopian. What he cannot conceive is that social revolution or alteration will not alter the mystery or the meaning or the possibility of poverty—of the poor man whom God has placed on a pedestal. It is interesting to note that Farrell's approach to the problem and resolution of social evil and injustice is based upon his acceptance of the philosophy of progress (the modern materialist belief in progress, both bourgeois and Marxist utopianism) along with its easy corollary, the philosophy of despair or absolute pessimism (the resort or submission to despair when history doesn't turn out as expected or intended).

Farrell cannot grasp the Church's sense of the mystery of human history and destiny, with its "relative pessimism," as Maritain describes it in his The Twilight of Civilization:

If twilight ushers in night, night itself precedes day. And in human history it often happens that the first rays of a dawn are mingled with the twilight. In my mind, the notion of the present trials endured by civilization was inseparable from that of a new humanism, which is in preparation in the present death-struggle of the world, and which at the same time is preparing the renewal of civilization even if it be only for the time that St. Paul predicts as "a resurrection from among the dead."

The Church that Farrell makes real, in his twilight of civilization, is not the Church of resurrection, with perennial prospects of generating an integral humanism. His Church is a church of miserable stagnation, of the deadly living and the living dead. . . .

In offering what appear to be his most persevering images, Farrell impresses upon the reader the force of his unflinching honesty and the rectitude of his zealous, if limited, social sense and social responsibility. His fictions do not advance, however; they simply intensify (or accumulate), with monotonous repetitiveness and generally with unboundaried crudity, the dim experiences that have wholly engrossed the author. With regard to his most important characterizations, he is best, I think, in detailing the confused and naked heart of his primitive hero, Studs, and its incoherent search for a nebulous center. . . .

When Farrell, the artist as a young man, forsook his religion and his city, he did not really, like Joyce, find his new strength in art but in society as a kind of reporter or transcriber of the density of contemporary American society. Although he is an inveterately serious writer, Farrell, in ultimate appraisal, is an earnest sociologist rather than a very good artist. His attitude toward literature (and his sense of his task), expressed as recently as 1947 in his Literature and Morality, has not got beyond the conception prevalent in the later nineteenth and earlier twentieth century.

The tendencies current in today's literature, altering "the entire face of the novel," are not what Farrell thinks they are. The "progress of science" and realism and naturalism in literature, as we know these elements, have, I think, run their course, except possibly in this country. But, says Farrell, "the naturalistic movement has not died out in literature." While he may be right in saying that through naturalism and realism "untold possibilities have been perceived and utilized," this is, nevertheless, no longer the day of Zola or Hardy or George Moore or Dreiser—nor is it, any longer, the day of Farrell. . . .

Farrell's great energy never amounts to poetry (if the evocative word meant everything to Joyce, it means nothing to Farrell) and his consciousness of the evil of civilization never becomes a vision or grows into the stature of a cosmology. He is unable to transcend, by any affinity with poetry and philosophy, the old naturalistic mode to which he has doggedly and humorlessly devoted himself. His people remain for the most part like animals "creeping forward" from one ferocious frustration to another. His situations radiate but little light: "And there was nothing to see. The world was full of blackness."

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