JAMES T. FARRELL, THE ARTIST MILITANT

...His heroes are young men, like Bernard Carr, literally in search of a "biography," obsessed with attaining a visible and complete life...

...Time and time again, Farrell depicted people living in worlds unsuited for full human life...

...Farrell did not simply write books, he had a career...

...The censorship battle is over...

...He put his readers into their world without introduction or exploration...

...It was a career of conviction...

...All the more reason that society should provide, if not meaning, at least, within its limited means, justice...

...In their author's words, Danny is an "unsuccessful conformist," Bernard has "sold out...

...For Farrell, sociology was as much a metaphor as a method...

...He wrote about people so enmeshed and trapped in the stereotypes of their culture that their lives are sociology...

...I shall change the sentence...

...Farrell knew that nothing the uneducated of whatever class can suggest to the educated is more troubling than the possibility that consciousness is not a delilght, nor a refuge, nor even a problem for large masses of people who are allowed to have no epistemological mastery over life at all...

...Whether Studs was his greatest novel or not, he was sure he could not be adequately approached by the evaluation of his individual works...

...Farrell's anger was never directed against his characters, nor, a harder feat, did he condescend to them...

...Farrell made little use of an overarching narrative consciousness, whether to coax his characters into articulation in the Jamesian way, or to mother their mutism as Dreiser did...

...Farrell was always ready to fulminate about the critics' neglect and misunderstanding of him, but in the last analysis, he wrote for himself...

...Farrell attended the University of Chicago as a young man in the 1920s, when its department of sociology was changing American thinking...

...IF FARRELL IIAD NOT POSSESSED a major talent and a major subject, his feat of endurance would be less interesting if still significant...

...they are static and nonhistorical, creatures of paradigm, not of process...

...he couldn't even afford to admit that such might be the case...

...q 216...

...So hard is it, Farrell believed, to clear and use the mind...

...writing is "hard work," he explained, and a "life-long occupation...

...He wrote movingly about the ethnic urban working, lowermiddle and middle classes, most notably in Studs Lonigan, the Danny O'Neill pentalogy, the Bernard Carr trilogy, This Man and This Woman, and a handful of the short stories and novellas that span his career...

...At the close of Studs Lonigan, while Studs is dying of pneumonia, his father, Paddy Lonigan, an upwardly mobile Irishman now hard hit by the Depression, watches a parade of Communist symphathizers...

...Farrell knew this, and he knew, like most writers, but with special poignancy, that writing keeps off the thought of death in its most frightening form...

...Others will honor James Farrell...

...and this was the most radical selfdefinition possible to one who believed that America was becoming a nation of consumers and spectators...

...The malice he drew from censors and critics was out of proportion to the boldness, or the awkwardness, of his enterprise...

...He still believed that "the artist fares best if he's militant because the artist is thrown on a hostile environment...

...Danny's mother, Liz O'Neill, with her few remaining teeth and her many toothaches, her constant trips to the church, her aversion to housework, who throws up her skirt and flaunts her bare "bacon" when someone insults her...

...His failure to respond is a measure of his predicament, but it is also a measure of the difficulties of the Communists...

...With Farrell's death, we have lost our finest literary perspective on the meaning of assimilation and ambition in American life, and a writer uniquely and admirably free from that most malignant form of cultural life: audience dependency...

...For Farrell, writing was still a synonym for selfsufficiency...

...it is not his only major one...

...Few have been better chroniclers than Farrell of that particularly American experience and subject, the mood: the endless series of frightened adjustments called living, the lunging and inching toward attention by each individual psyche within a hopelessly blurred crowd, the troubled intimacy with which one tentatively fixes and appropriates one's alien persona, the confusion in which one haphazardly sorts the fragmented hurtful thoughts one wakes up to and goes to sleep with...

...One says the best and worst that can be said of Farrell when one acknowledges that 215 inspiration figured little in his idea and practice of artistic production...

...Farrell was strikingly willing to admit that even his heroes, Danny O'Neill and Bernard Carr, both writers by aspiration and both usually taken as copies of Farrell, are failures...

...In a 1975 interview, Farrell remarked that many of his early beliefs were unshaken, if modified...

...Yet writing was not simply therapy for Farrell, although it served therapeutic needs...

...Consciousness in Farrell's world is not natural, it is hardly taught within the system Americans euphemistically refer to as educational, and in a country where people, in Farrell's words, "can't do . . . much" with their feelings, emotion is a dangerous but frequent substitute for awareness...

...Their rejection of their milieu, Danny's of Roman Catholic poverty, Carr's of his family and later of Communism, seems to exhaust their capacity for creativity...

...FARRELL CREATED A FICTIONAL WORLD very like the actual one his characters inhabit...

...But Farrell's impatience at being typecast simply as the author of Studs was more than an artist's disappointment and anger at being valued so slightly...

...Farrell's work forms a special subset of the proletarian or class novel, a subset that might be labeled the novel of impoverished environment...

...Things happen— two men paint a house and talk awkwardly about loyalty, a boy and a girl sit in a tree in a park, a woman takes another drink when she has resolved not to...

...We possess, as he meant us to, his example and his books, Farrell's work constitutes the last important experiment to date in American literature with what can be viewed as deliberately unedited material...

...Farrelll grew up as the son of an Irish Catholic teamster on the south side of Chicago...

...the sense of duration, of slippage...

...Danny's good-looking aunt, Margaret, whose strengths bring no reward, whose weaknesses precipitate the determining events in her life, slowly going under a tide of anger and alcohol: such figures exist as entirely and intimately as Farrell's readers know themselves to exist...

...each was a test of his capacity to understand and convey equality...

...Danny's father, Jim O'Neill, a teamster, kind, generous, overworked, ignorant of social causes, unable to understand why he has lived and is dying, simply accepting "what we call another day...

...This was Farrell's credo...

...the critical one has barely begun...

...Farrell cared for his characters...

...Yet the felt 214 humanity of Studs, of the O'Neills, does not insure them a human existence, and this discrepancy is the source of Farrell's art and his defiance...

...Studs Lonigan is probably Farrell's best work...

...He was a master in the creation of mass scenes: raging, hilarious, bitter family quarrels with a cast of dozens, piously organized civic and religious festivities, violent, protracted New Year's Eve parties...

...they will read and sort and care for his works if we do not...

...consciousness, while often painfully present, wrongly forecasts experience or lags in its rear, marshaling the cliches that will stamp out what vitality it may possess...

...He was in a difficult position...

...The influence on Farrell is unmistakable, but he was a novelist, not a sociologist...

...Farrell described writing as "work" in the Marxist sense, the result of "social labor" performed "that he [the author] may have developed his talent," and the incentive to "lifelong" effort...

...The night is passing...

...He still admired Trotsky, while realizing that history did not "turn out" as Trotsky had predicted...

...Farrell protested life itself, the "universe of time," the "cancer" he wrote of in his later years, the seriatim moments that push people through existence without necessarily enriching them, the moments that transform experience into an endurance test...

...Writing was paying back a debt, making a promise, hurling a challenge...

...The inheritor of a largely unscrutinized American literary tradition represented by Dreiser, Anderson, and Lewis, Farrell had both the talent and the subject...

...Farrell depicted a social and economic order committed to consumption, to distracting people from the void it itself widens, to waste...

...Paddy Lonigan's limited consciousness is a fact whose evolution Farrell understands and traces...

...In 1940, when a young man asked Farrell how he should go about becoming a writer, Farrell's first piece of advice, characteristically, was that his correspondent read the biographies of great writers...

...Writing for Farrell was the only postponement of the inevitable --a definition that covers most of life as Farrell portrays it —that admits what it postpones, and thus genuinely happens...

...Farrell went on detailing the difficulties of maturation in latecapitalist American culture not only because he needed to do so, but because the story as he told it was interesting whether anyone else thought so or not, and perhaps most of all because his act in spelling it out was the only thing surely not predicted by the conglomeration of cosmic accident and corporate design that passes foi reality...

...he respects Lonigan's inabilities as social truth and human tragedy...

...he couldn't stop writing because he had at times nothing or little new to say...

...He was interested in consciousness less as the privilege of the writer than as the reflection, even the mimicry, of social programming, and as the forming intention to escape the milieu that stereotypes it...

...Farrell couldn't stop writing because the critics ignored or condemned him...

...he willed to have it and that will lay behind every sentence typed onto every page...

...Paddy perceives that they look "happy," but he doesn't understand them or their purpose, and he goes to a bar to get drunk...

...Farrell's books are, for better and worse, in this important sense uncontrolled...

...He kept a vast collection of notecards near his "study" (a small writing desk, holding a typewriter and facing the window, placed at one end of his kitchen), one card for each of the characters who appear and disappear in his vast Balzacean chronicle of American life...

...A novelist writing in what can still be best defined as the post-Jamesian period of fiction and criticism, he did not believe that consciousness is equivalent to reality, that it is the place where all events, ideas, and people must come to be tested, examined, validated...

...Yet if there is anything James Farrell .was not, it was a onebook author...

...For his had been a planned and protracted effort...

...Danny O'Neill, always "the slave of what he wanted others to think of him...

...Anyone who writes knows that sometimes one must write badly because the psychological need to keep writing is greater than the actual ability to write well, that even bad writing insures that the keys will still feel familiar when one at last sits down with something on one's mind...

...Yet he did so in part because he believed that writing alone could be permanently political...

...The night is in process...

...Studs Lonigan with his punk pretensions, his failing heart, his cliche-clotted mind...

...History has no purpose," Farrell wrote in a late novel and demonstrated in everything he produced...

...I sit down at a small desk," Farrell wrote in a late novel...

...Writing, for Farrell, was the vocation of the rebel...

...Farrell always defended the author's right to handle whatever material attracted him, despite strictures from the left or right...

...I shall change the sentence again...

...No one has equalled Farrell's sustained delineation of second- and thirdgeneration Americans: women who must live too often as stereotypes within the minds of would-be stereotypes, men who are fans and outsiders in their adopted land, incarnations of social anxiety...

...By every device available to a highly talented writer, including at times brilliantly appropriate language, Farrell brought home to his readers that his characters are really "there...