Arts and Letters

At James T. Farrell's funeral service, his friend Kurt Vonnegut noted that Farrell was reluctant to appear at the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, to which he had been elected in 1942. Farrell after the Second World War and the decline of what literary historians so easily bundle together as "naturalism" became inordinately self-conscious about the seeming decline in his literary fortunes. And of course it is true that nothing means so much to writers as the opinion of other writers. But he had more admirers here than he knew.

While Jim Farrell as a man never quite overcame the harshness of his youth and the opprobrium he originally suffered for undertaking on an almost epic scale a whole series of novels about Chicago Irish life, Farrell the novelist, Farrell at his best, created a lasting work. Farrell's undue sensitivity as a person was countered by the brilliant social rationale of the Studs Lonigan trilogy—a work so deeply planted in city life that we always look at a certain time and place through Farrell's eyes.

"Studs" has lasted as indomitably as Irish fervor and the still raw energy that comes leaping at you everywhere in Chicago. The book works all the way, because Farrell brought a relentless social logic to his primordial subject—the gang and the way its adolescent follies and brutalities keep the gang together but wreck the would-be-tough and pseudo-tough Studs through their total spiritual poverty.

Farrell the novelist certainly saw all that lies behind the American cry for the good life. His key insight was that Studs is a totally deceived "consumer," who can never see beyond the system that feeds our desires; he will never understand why, obedient to all the American temptations, he will fail totally. Studs lives as a conditioned reflex. One of Farrell's triumphs is to show how bored Studs is much of his life. Stud's greatest surprise is how meaningless things soon become.

Harsh and exacting as this social theory was, it made for a book that has lasted in the minds and affections of many readers. There is great residual power in a book that gives shape and meaning to the life that so many Americans have lived unconsciously. Farrell was the plainest, most ungainly, I almost said the most humble stylist imaginable. But his obsession, as he said, was with "the patterns of American destinies, and with presenting the manner in which they unfold in our time." The words are flat, but Farrell got his audience to see the "destinies" of Americans as a social creation not always recognized by Americans themselves.

"Goofy" Danny O'Neill, as the gang always called him, somehow got free of the gang and became a writer. Danny's creator—and alter ego—was loved by his friends as much for his sense of justice and his emotional generosity as for his fidelity to the "dreams of my youth." In his own way his best work had triumphed, though it was not possible for a man with his bitter experience and sardonic view of American society to believe this. One of his favorite observations was from Chekhov: What other writers take for granted, the writer from the lower class pays for with his youth.