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The Unpopular Front: James T. Farrell then, Margaret
Hassan now
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Seaghán Ó Murchú • 21
November 2004
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Among
leftist writers once lionised in America, James
T. Farrell suffered (along his slightly older counterpart
John Dos Passos) one of the most precipitous declines.
Imagine: having published his Studs Lonigan
trilogy before the age of 30, he was not even 50
when he was assumed dead—at least on a plaque
put up to honour past literati who had resided at
New York’s bohemian accommodation, The Hotel
Chelsea. When I read his trilogy, considered the
quintessential Irish American expression in print,
it had just been reissued along with a 1979 TV version.
I never saw the adaptation, but the evocation of
documentary detail combined with sociological re-creation
appealed to me much as some science-fiction has.
That is, clumsily but engrossingly told. For Farrell,
like authors of other genre fiction, conveyed the
force of ideas and scenes rather than the polish
of style and craft. The energy of his vocation propelled
him past the fifty-book mark by his death, the same
year that I read him and that the TV series appeared.
Self-absorbed,
self-pitying, and self-righteous, these traits kept
Farrell a type himself. Robert K. Landers, in An
Honest Writer, offers a comprehensive biography
drawing on not so much Farrell’s fiction as
his character. Many installments in his large oeuvre
gain barely a sentence or so of comment from Landers.
This approach discourages newcomers from seeking
out his lesser-known works, but apparently, Landers
implies from the lack of coverage given the vast
majority of his published product, they aren’t
worth the bother.
Like
Wordsworth, an earlier radical doomed to outlive
his Romantic contemporaries and driven to keep churning
out sub-standard contributions in order to support
himself and satisfy his compulsion to create, Farrell
poured out much of his waking time—aided by
amphetamine addiction—into manic bursts of
immersion, He could conjure up, as he had in Studs
Lonigan’s Southside Chicago’s Washington
Park neighbourhood, a wealth of precisely recalled
descriptions, exactly rendered conversations, and
characters drawn from life—his life, and his
family. This did not endear him to all of his childhood
and adolescent chums, not to mention his relatives,
who found themselves not caricatured but recorded
in his fiction, with only their names changed. But,
protecting no innocents.
A
dropout from the eminent University of Chicago,
Farrell’s studiously amateur but doggedly pursued
course of largely autodidactic education led him
early to reject the Church and embrace atheism.
But, perhaps like Joyce in his creative vision if
not his intellectual rigour, he could never truly
leave Rome in favour of more rational or chilly
cultural climes. As Joyce limned Dublin, so Farrell
Chicago. Despite living in New York City most of
his life, his best work emerged from his early encounters
on the Southside.
Encouraged
by John Dewey’s U of C pragmatic theories,
Farrell captured his youthful milieu and forced
it to speak not only for his own growth but--more
to the point of his most successful fiction--to
illustrate how his slum bred prejudice, narrowmindedness,
and addiction. Like Joyce’s paralysis, Farrell
sought to link his native environment to its religious,
cultural, and familial blights, and to blame on
them the failure of those who lacked the guidance,
the will, or the courage to escape impoverished
early 20c tenements.
Landers,
in his study, examines what for readers of The
Blanket may prove especially instructive events.
Farrell became, rare for an Irish American from
a Catholic upbringing in the 1930s and 40s, a prominent
promoter of first Marxist and later democratic socialist
causes. Landers, revealing a low-key but persistent
distrust of Stalinist manipulation as he charts
Farrell’s entry into the hazardous territory
of the Cominform-directed fronts operating within
American progressivism and radicalism during the
Depression, shows extensively and carefully how
Farrell’s idealistic intentions were consistently
tainted by those to whom he could not ultimately
pledge allegiance: the majority of the Left who
defended the Man of Steel. To his credit, as early
as the bloodletting in 1934 following the murder
of Sergei Kirov--Leningrad party boss, too independent
for Stalin’s liking-- Farrell suspected that
his intellectual colleagues, all too eager to defend
the Great Terror that would ensue past the end of
the decade, were hoodwinked at best and dismissive
at worst to the crimes committed in the name of
a worker’s state by its supposed first among
equals. Farrell’s resistance to the Communist
Party in the USA aroused hatred by his peers, many
of whom, ironically, would only confess decades
later their own complicity in excusing and propagandising
the fates of millions who were charged, more often
totally innocent of such allegations, of the crimes
with which Stalin and his millions of willing defenders
outside of the CCCP blamed and condemned them to
exile, incarceration, or murder.
As
a pioneer in the non-Stalinist Marxist left, Farrell
found himself isolated. Having severed himself from
the Church, he could expect no support from his
Irish American constituency. Working first in Chicago
and then New York, he was despised by most on the
Left for his subversive stance. As an anti-capitalist
(although all too eager to keep earning his royalties),
he found few others to sustain his independently
conceived arguments against totalitarianism. Although
he never became a Trotskyite, he co-directed the
campaign to defend the exiled Soviet strongman against
Stalin’s prosecutors, and visited him in Mexico.
Gradually, fair-minded leftists understood the convictions
shared by Farrell in his spirited and long-standing
efforts to urge an international investigation from
a third-party faction into the charges leveled by
Stalin against his rival. It is to Trotsky’s
credit--although he no less than Stalin favoured
a bloody hand in crushing opponents to Soviet dictates
as they kept being rewritten--that he would have,
Landers quotes, have willingly gone back to Moscow
to face death if even one of the claims made by
Stalin could in the slightest way have been proven
by an international tribunal.
Trotsky,
at least in this matter, and Farrell shared a quality
mentioned more than once by those who knew James
T. Integrity: this characterised Farrell’s
determination. In politics and in his writing, he
shared a tendency familiar to many Irish people.
He was blunt, incapable of honeyed words not out
of cruelty but out of a habit of bypassing the social
graces. He’d blurt out, uncensored, right away
in whatever situation he found himself in, no matter
whom he spoke with. He was simply childlike in this
sense. He couldn’t grasp, intelligent although
he was, that anyone would be offended if he simply
told what was on his mind. Too often, in New York’s
leftist circles, he was derided as a drunken buffoon.
This led, as he attempted to advance his career
past Studs, into a long slide downwards.
Like many youthful revolutionaries, he would have
to learn to live with the failure of his stillborn
utopia, and he would live long after the failure
of Stalin shrouded but never fully extinguished
his beliefs: up to death, he supported what became
Social Democrats-USA.
This
lifelong desire to improve the lot of those with
whom he was raised and among whom he visited in
his crusade to forge a united non-communist Left
demonstrates Farrell’s inherent decency. I
admired, near the end of Landers’ incisive
and exhaustively researched study, a quote unearthed
when Farrell, in 1963, addressed students at St.
Peter’s College in New Jersey. This excerpt
reveals that he, like the best of us, attempted
to remain open to honest awareness wherever he found
it. Concomitantly, he never reneged on his youthful
commitment to fight for his own right to think,
freed of dogma, creed, or commissar. He speaks of
the benefits of a Catholic education of which he
had long been a foe. Acknowledging his opposition,
he admits he was wrong when it came to four points:
-
That truth is possible, it’s possible to
think of the world in terms of order;
-
I
was never told a lie; I was given a conception
of the meaning of the truth as important;
-
I
got a sense that there was something before me
and something after me, that there was a depth
of experience, and that I was living in a continuity
where there was depth of experience and where
there was an idea of greatness and grandeur and
also of mystery and reality—where you face
tragedy, you face yourself. You ask yourself if
you sin or not. That can have the effect of making
you see rather realistically.
-
I get the idea that there are things so important
in this world that it’s your duty to die
for them if necessary, and that the values are
more important than you.
Transcribing
this, I think of the decapitation of Margaret Hassan.
In the long catalogue of crimes committed by those
who have invaded Iraq listed in The Blanket
as well as so many media, her loss was unmentioned.
Certainly (4) above can serve as an epitaph by one
activist, four decades earlier, to one barely dead.
Farrell, I believe, would never hide behind the
fact that the West had brutalised so many of those
among whom he canvassed as he rallied for a united
Left in excusing the barbaric calculus employed
by those who would claim the moral high ground by
assassinating one of their own. A CARE director,
on behalf of whom those who she had assisted in
Baghdad had rolled out on their wheelchairs to ask
that clemency be shown her by those who cowardly
drape themselves in the garb of the righteous against
all of us infidels. Having adopted Islam, married
an Iraqi, learned the language, and for three decades
laboring selflessly among the people she had joined,
how can her murder be ignored? If Margaret Hassan,
by her decision to leave (as so many of her fellow
Irish have done in service to a higher purpose than
their own profit) the West for the Third World,
can be judged by her captors as guilty, who is innocent?
Irish people, who as Bertie Ahern testified, have
so supported the Arab nations, should be ashamed
that one of their own has been beheaded by fanatics
of an insurgency urged by so many Irish today. I
urge readers to re-examine Farrell’s quote.
He can place the shortcomings of an ideal aside
to praise its valuable insights. This goes for both
sides in any debate. We, as with the Left in the
1930s, must not fall into defending evil, as if
no ethical advantage exists. Dogma can blind those
who seek justice. Farrell’s generous acceptance
of a message that he rationally could no longer
follow but which he nonetheless could acknowledge
in its noble intentions should--as another form
of totalitarianism threatens those of us who assert
tolerance--serve also as a warning for those who,
on the left or the right, Stalinist or Wahhabi,
refuse to return tolerance to us.
Farrell,
in his own weaknesses exacerbated by drink and pills,
could also lapse from good graces. From the 1950s
on, he began to berate editors as he continued to
churn out increasingly shopworn themes drawn from
his early Chicago days. While his strongest work
flowed from a seemingly effortless ability to express
the feel of the times in which he grew, in time
this soured the reading public and failed to spark
sustained innovation on his part. Born in 1904,
as the century lengthened, he failed to catch up
with its growth in terms of literary sophistication.
He never liked the modernists, and the realists
who began to eclipse his naturalism after WWII looked
at Farrell as they would Theodore Dreiser or Emile
Zola—too wedded to mechanistic theories of
conditioning to allow any free will for individuals.
As with many idealists, he early embraced and ultimately
became a prisoner of his unbending, resolute, and
myopic allegiance to a grand unified theory.
Outside
of his writing, he floundered. As the Cold War began
he started to find more sympathetic ears for his
globetrotting efforts to rouse a non-Stalin international
leftist movement; in his personal life he lacked
direction. One afternoon, after making love to his
wife, he announced to her that he was in love with
another woman. This woman, a mysterious actress,
gave him two sons, but the older one was verbally
abused by her and the younger one was so retarded
that he never recognised his parents. In the fashion
of the time, he was sent to a home for the rest
of his life. Farrell himself, born into the stereotypically
lower-class slum family, was given up by his own
parents at a young age to be raised by his aunt
and her folks. This inability to love easily, a
trait of many real and fictional Irish and Irish
American families, shows his life imitating his
art.
Farrell
could be unsparing in detailing the aspirations
achieved and dreamed by those who grew out of the
Southside into the ‘petty bourgeois’ but,
again, this knack found itself balanced by his own
inability to live on what would now be $150,000
a year. He lost his second wife to her own paranoia
(she apparently lied to him about a miscarriage
to get money out of him when he was abroad) and
his workaholic drug-fueled passion. He remarried
his first wife only to discover in the pages of
the African American magazine Jet in the
1950s that she had, it claimed, married, after she
first divorced James, a black musician. This revelation
did not bother Farrell, as he knew of their relationship
if not its formalisation. Uncovering a stash of
his wife’s ongoing correspondence and sharing
of funds with him after Farrell had remarried her,
however, did upset Farrell.
Later,
he found comfort with a number of younger women,
confirming the mystery of the disheveled, addicted,
drunken, slovenly, and portly older man who attracts
fans of the opposite sex all too eager to bask in
his early fame. The 1960s and 1970s found him, eventually,
happier in love and vowing to produce a Balzac-like
25 or so interlinked novels called The Universe
of Time (the type of title all too recurring
in his list of published works). Fighting with his
publishers, seeking more outrageous royalties, imagining
bigger deals, he never stopped being a bantamweight
contender. Such stubbornness to accept criticism,
listen to others, or change his direction, in the
end, crippled Farrell from gaining eminence as a
great writer. He remained a one-hit wonder, doomed
to always be noted as ‘the author of Studs
Lonigan’ rather than his latest work. And,
like a musician playing the oldies circuit, audiences
never wanted to hear his new album, his claims that
the art he’d just done was his best effort
yet. He knew he had made it once, and had to keep
that bittersweet realisation for the next forty-five
years.
But,
in his defiance of the easy way out, in his view
of function as a method by which the struggles of
an Irish American slum family could be demonstrated,
and by his forthright adherence to a cause called
by many idealistic but by him somehow achievable,
Farrell leaves a legacy better found, as Landers
shows, in his refusal to put his characters into
either revolutionary romanticism or socialist realism.
As early as his first and best work, Farrell promised
that he would never toe the party line. When writers
were expected to kow-tow to how Lenin ordered art
to be manufactured, Farrell broke the mold and hand-crafted
his own awkward but endearing figures. When artists
were threatened to hammer heroic figures out of
proleterian clay, Farrell cleared a path for those
for whom truth could never surrender to an ideology.
For this, Farrell’s Studs and Landers’
Farrell deserve credit.
Robert
K. Landers, An Honest Writer: The Life and Times
of James T. Farrell. (San Francisco: Encounter
Books, 2004). Studs Lonigan has been reissued
in the Library of America hardcover series this
year.
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All
censorships exist to prevent any one from challenging
current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress
is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and
executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently
the first condition of progress is the removal of censorships.
- George Bernard Shaw
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