An Honest Writer by Robert K Landers
Greeley, Andrew
BOOKS Waking Jim Farrell The Life and Times of James T. Farrell Robert K. Landers Encounter Books, $28.95, 562pp. Andrew Greeley When we were growing up, whispers in the school spoke about a...
...His literary fame has waxed and waned through the years, but the recent publication of the Library of America edition of the Lonigan trilogy suggests that he is now one of the immortals, albeit, perhaps, a minor one...
...Not only are his descriptions good sociology, they capture the stress and the strain, the hope and the despair, the love and the hate that are and always have been part of the Irish heritage...
...Landers confirms that Studs was not an autobiographical character, though Danny O'Neill and Ed Ryan were...
...It was not the (as we say here in Chicago) university's fault...
...Farrell could be shocked to see a priest and a nun in a restaurant smoking and drinking...
...They haven't changed at all...
...And can one be an atheist and still be a Catholic...
...Peter's College in Jersey City...
...Farrell caught perfectly the magic of such love...
...Not everyone, surely...
...Jim Farrell lost his Catholicism at the University of Chicago, which he attended in the mid-1920s...
...I sure hope so...
...Landers also suggests that the very early love (which Farrell would later claim he rewrote at least twenty-five times) between Studs and Lucy Scan-Ion was imaginary...
...Today, most Catholics would leave judgment to the Deity...
...Some critics claim that Farrell wrote without compassion for his characters...
...The Catholic chaplain at the university tells me that half of the Catholic students attend the Eucharist every week...
...As I say, the church would not let go of him...
...Edgar Branch, a Farrell scholar Landers cites, identifies her as Lucy Shannon, the sister of Helen Shannon-whom Farrell worshipped when he was ten and she eleven, though at a great distance...
...I know of no fictional treatment of love on the distant cusp of adolescence simultaneously intense and shallow, long since forgotten and yet unforgettable, that is more moving...
...Carmel High School (which he had attended as a boy when it was called St...
...Once a Catholic, always a Catholic...
...Cyril...
...Carmel priory, I was clandestinely swimming at night in the school's darkened pool, courtesy of a key the school principal had given me...
...In those days, approbation from Wright was almost as good as a papal knighthood...
...She showed me an unpublished study called "Classmates of Studs...
...Farrell was buried in Calvary Cemetery in Chicago, with a Carmelite priest presiding...
...Landers's work, ten years in the doing, is a brilliant exercise in the biographic art...
...Even though Farrell died, as Landers says, an avowed atheist, can one still claim for him a Catholic imagination...
...Farrell captured the Irish Catholics of St...
...He walked across Washington Park from St...
...Is sometime agnosticism incompatible with faith...
...David Lodge, in a September 4 interview in the London Tablet, avowed that he is an agnostic Catholic who likes to attend church on Sunday...
...Catholicism has a way of doing that...
...It was not necessary for him to endorse the church for his stories to be "Catholic," only that he depict it...
...Some claimed to have read it, though they likely had only seen certain selected passages...
...She insisted that she knew Lucy Scanlon...
...Jim Farrell was not always an easy man, sometimes perhaps not a good man, but he certainly was what Landers calls him in his title, an honest man...
...I never met Jim Farrell, though I received an almost completely illegible post card from him once, a friendly post card as best as I could tell...
...He was delighted, after he received the American Academy of Arts and Science Emerson-Thoreau Award in 1979, that a representative of Cardinal John Wright approached him with the cardinal's congratulations...
...However, we must leave the question of his ultimate salvation to God...
...Andrew Greeley When we were growing up, whispers in the school spoke about a dirty book called Studs Lonigan...
...Is it our God-Therese of Lisieux's God of nothing but mercy and love-or some fraudulent imposter...
...He was also at times a very good writer and in what Charles Fanning dubs his Washington Park novels (Studs Lonigan and Danny O'Neill) a great American writer, however much the Modern Language Association in its usual ideological swamp may have banned discussion of him at its annual meetings...
...Sometimes he would simply sit inside a church...
...In preconciliar Catholicism, such questions would be dismissed quickly and easily...
...The spiritual poverty in which Farrell-like his creation Studs Lonigan-grew up hardly prepared him for the rigorous intellectual challenge the university presented...
...The author, James T. Farrell (1904-79), found his equivalent of Faulkner's Oxford County Mississippi in Chicago's South Side Irish Catholic neighborhoods of the early twentieth century...
...In his forthcoming dazzling study of the Catholic imagination of Graham Greene, Mark Bosco, SJ, argues that Greene was also an agnostic Catholic and that his so-called post-Catholic novels are in fact post-Vatican II novels-as are many of Lodge's recent works, including Paradise News...
...Mary Liguori Brophy, BVM-longtime sociologist at Mundelein College-was a classmate of Farrell's at St...
...Yet he apparently did draw from real life in creating Lucy...
...We could even have talked about Lucy...
...Maybe the answer to that question is another question-who is the God in whom the avowed atheist does not believe...
...Or is it a necessary part of faith in Greene's distinction between belief and faith...
...Formally, perhaps, he did not...
...They have better educations, make more money, and easily survive the university...
...He could not write about his people any other way...
...Anselm...
...Yet as I read Robert K. Landers's magisterial An Honest Writer, I found myself wondering whether Catholicism ever lost Farrell...
...However, in later years when his white-hot anger at spiritual poverty cooled, he was much more gentle, as in The Death of Nora Ryan (1978), a book which, in my only serious disagreement with Landers, I admire greatly...
...Andrew Greeley is the author of, most recently, The Catholic Revolution (University of California Press), and The Priestly Sins (Tor), a novel...
...Most of those who survived were successful, conservative Republicans...
...So I will await conversations in the world to come with Farrell and Lucy (and/or Helen), and with my own very young loves...
...One believes at the end that one knows Jim Farrell-his stubborn dedication to his work, his passionate belief in freedom, his charm, his (often problematic) loyalties, his frequently uncouth and rude habits, his addiction to both alcohol and drugs, his womanizing, his paranoia, his impossible demands on his friends and colleagues, his courageous opposition to the Stalinist thought police in the literary world of the thirties and forties, the tragedy of the early death of children, the conflict in his early marriages, his persistence in writing despite hostile reviewers, his enthusiasm for baseball as represented by the White Sox and the Yankees (venial sins at the most), his eventual financial success as a writer, a very happy marriage (in all but legal name), triumph over the drink if not over the amphetamines, some important critical acclaim...
...His lifelong relationship with the Carmelites suggests that he did not want to...
...Perhaps he should have been more sympathetic toward them...
...He taught for a time at St...
...But in the same years that he was living occasionally at the Mt...
...It tends to cling to people who try to leave it behind, to stick to them even when they think they are rid of it...
...Anselm's parish to the university and left his religion behind...
...Hears ago, the late Joel Wells, editor of the Critic, called and asked me to reread the Lonigan books and write an article about how the South Side Irish of Chicago had changed since the time of Studs...
...Farrell wrote about them with unsparing accuracy, especially about the atmosphere of "spiritual poverty"-their depressing surroundings, numbing work, and Catholic rigidity- which he saw in their lives...
...Often when he came to Chicago, he lived in the priory at Mt...
...Farrell rejoiced at the changes of the council and, according to some who knew him (not cited in Landers's book), claimed credit for the council...
...He also admired the current pope's bravery in the battle with communism in Poland...
...The issue, though, is not whether he died in union with the church of his childhood...
...They are more self-confident, sometimes obnoxiously so, but the insecurities and the fatalism and the hope are still there...
...Anselm's and of most other parishes of Chicago precisely at the time they were fighting their way out of material and spiritual poverty...
...Yet if one writes accurately about the importance of sacramental-ity and community, how can one be denied the label Catholic...
...Same close family ties, same neighborhood loyalties, same hunger for affection which they cannot express, same labyrinthine patterns of love and hate in their intimate relations, same forced laughter and easy tears, same deep Catholic roots...
...He praised Catholic education...
...Yet the Catholic imagination that sustains the faith with its deep spiritual sources and raw power is not easy to lose, as the plays of Eugene O'Neill testify...
...In a tip of my hat to Farrell, the patriarch of the Ryan family in my novels is called Ed Ryan...
...The article is a sensitive, warm portrait of his family, the Irish, and especially the nuns who taught him in parochial schools...
...Might one claim for Farrell the title of "Catholic atheist" and suggest that the books about Lonigan, O'Neill, and Ed Ryan could also be considered postconcilar novels written before the fact...
...Too bad we didn't encounter one another...
...This journal and America reviewed his novels favorably, and his "The World I Grew Up In" appeared here in the February 25,1966, issue...
...If Farrell had been born thirty years later, might he be a tenured professor at a Catholic university today...
...In so doing, Farrell's Catholic imagination luxuriated in the community loyalties and the ritual symbols of the faith...
...The late Sr...
...I read the trilogy (for the first time) and called Joel back...
...I would have claimed him as one of ours on the principle that Catholicism means here comes everyone...
...The creator of Studs as a "Commonweal Catholic...
Vol. 131 • November 2004 • No. 20
