The Studs Lonigan trilogy is in many ways a great piece of work; and the Danny O'Neill tetralogy, although it is less sustained, contains large sections of intense, imaginative, sometimes brilliant writing. That is why so many of us have regarded Mr. Farrell's later books with increasing dismay. The novels and the short stories that have come from him since then have betrayed, most unhappily for those who rated Farrell high among contemporary writers, an ebbing of literary power. They have been marked, upon the superficial writing level, by dulness and fatigue, and more profoundly by a barrenness of spirit. His last novel, Bernard Clare, seemed to me to suffer from this basic fallacy: that no man as callow and unimaginative, as completely unformed, as Bernard Clare was shown to be, could possibly be a creative writer, as Farrell postulated he was.

All of Bernard Clare's cynical strictures upon the New York scene were negated entirely by the fact that he was not himself a subtle or a penetrating observer. I feel this to be a characteristic of all of Farrell's recent work, and especially of these short stories now published as When Boyhood Dreams Come True. They are bitter, they are acidulous—in fact, to risk an anticlimax, they are extremely unhappy—yet there is no authority in them because there is nowhere a solid vantage point from which we may view the shambles with understanding, no recognizable moment of clear affirmation, to impose meaning upon the long and truly monotonous chant of negation.

At the very end of one story called "John Hitchcock," which is a very bitter account of a hack writer thrashing about obscurely in the pseudo-literary world of Greenwich Village, the writer himself cries out—these are the closing words—"Nothing! Nothing! Nothing!" The same words, audible or not, issue from the mouth and spirit of every character of these stories, and they might well be placed upon the title page. They are definitive. They are the secret that every one of these people—Hitchcock the writer, Willie Collins the express dispatcher, Eddie McGoorty the neophyte priest, Tom Finnegan the soldier, Cal Dolan the basketball player, Fritz the German liberal, Roland the college student—clutches painfully to himself: that he is an empty husk, that there is no spark of divinity in him, that he knows he hates everything but doesn't know that he loves anything, that inside of him, beside hatred and disgust and fear, there is nothing! nothing! And in none of them, in none of their histories, is there any strength of any kind. Their revulsion is meaningless since they recoil toward nothing. Their flight inspires in us neither pity nor enthusiasm, since they flee toward nothing. It is because they are so incapable of reacting with humanity to human experience, that we can have no feeling for them. I will cite one instance: sex. Sex is a vital element in at least half of these tales, and it is, every time, a monstrous and destructive element. It is, every time, something quite shameful and dirty, and it is never a good experience or a happy one.

I cannot help but feel that Mr. Farrell, in one of his selves, has accepted the fearful and hypocritical view of nature from which, with his other, he flees so violently. What validity can there be in his writing until he comes to grips with himself?

The dulness and the fatigue which I have mentioned above rise out of these conditions. The long, stubborn dialogues on church doctrine are the same long, stubborn dialogues we have already read in the Lonigan and O'Neill stories; nothing has been added. The dream sequences are less inspired than they were when Studs and Danny first dreamed them. There is the overpowering sense of moving backward on a treadmill of old furies, and there is indeed some internal evidence that these stories are not fresh material. I should like to see Mr. Farrell hold up a while, and think out his own destination, before he publishes again. Whatever it should be, he will sound and read more like the vigorous writer we have known, when he cuts away from this retelling of his beads, and moves in an affirmative direction.