Reflections at Fifty
FARRELL, JAMES T.
One of America's leading novelists discusses the forces that have shaped his life Reflections at Fifty By James T. Farrell There is a certain sadness in the passage of time, in the accumulation...
...My thoughts again go back to that day when I registered at the University...
...I sometimes sat in the Deux Magots...
...All of us are single solitary souls...
...And a sunny afternoon in June 1929...
...I had seen much of the grandeur and beauty of this world...
...In Chicago I see that which is new in our world and our century...
...And my twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth books are already completed...
...I had received a letter from Clifton Fadiman of Simon & Schuster, but I knew little of publishers in those days...
...James T. Farrell first won universal acclaim with his now classic novel, Studs Lonigan...
...Time has not worked its miracles on me...
...But, always, the content of my life has been mainly in my writing...
...I had been ill, and I was in a very troubled and frustrated period of my life...
...There is a line of his, which gave me the title for the last book I have published: "I spit into the face of time which has transfigured me...
...I think of Lake Michigan and the Mediterranean in storm when they are gray and rough and their waves pound the shores, and I think of them as peaceful and blue with the sun softly upon them, and with an infinite light sky of morning over them, and then with a darkening sky of twilight covering them at the dramatic end of the day...
...The scene of Lucy in the tree with Studs??which I wrote, in all, at least twenty-five times??was first composed that summer...
...He sees people destroying themselves and is helpless to do much other than to become an eloquent Cassandra...
...I read a big volume of his stories from beginning to end...
...Life carries the price tag of death...
...In the stones of Paris, in the cathedral of Notre Dame, in old streets, in many places, one sees the memorial of a harmony man has created, and one also feels that here is a memorial of many of the sorrows and aspirations of man...
...One could do nothing about the personal injustices which were mirrored in these stories...
...One cannot see a harmony as one sees it in Paris...
...These stories of de Maupassant are part of the recorded truth of human experience, of the memory of mankind...
...In various ways, this indignation was reflected in my first writings...
...But we come to know that the promise is different...
...Much that I wanted to read I have read...
...It is a promise of gaining some insight, of feeling something deeply, of learning something, of seeing something of the beauty and grandeur that is in the world: or it is a promise that we will see and feel and meet with something which, even though it may be sad or agonizing, will contribute toward our continuing development...
...In a sense, Studs Lonigan was born that afternoon...
...In our youth, we wake up expecting something wonderful will happen to us and that our lives will be changed...
...And more than once, I have, because of various circumstances, abandoned a life I was living and begun again...
...The years that separate me from those hopeful, ambitious and frustrated days of my youth have brought me many triumphs and many sadnesses...
...Many of the things I wanted to do I have done...
...They dreamed, too, of a better life than they had known...
...And then I thought that de Maupassant had written of this in his time...
...Mary Hunter told me that Simon & Schuster were successful publishers...
...And now, thinking of all this, thinking of much more, with the memories of many years flowing in and out of my mind, I am aware that I knew all of this in my youth...
...And, suddenly, I told myself that I had no complaints...
...I spoke of possible scenes, of how my book would lead to Studs's death, of a character who later became Weary Reilley...
...A great part of these years has been spent with myself sitting on a chair, alone, and writing with a pen, a pencil or a typewriter...
...Indignation has turned to a stoical feeling...
...There is more tranquility, but this is relative...
...And these injustices were but a fraction of those which have happened, year by year, in the history of man...
...Could there have been anyone in those lines of students who had more dreams, more ambitions than I? The ambition to write was only one of them...
...He is gone...
...Since 1928, I have written almost every day of my life...
...It is not possible at 50 to feel the indignations of one's youth...
...That Saturday afternoon, I kept telling myself that it had happened, that I had reached the University...
...In June 1925, I registered at the University of Chicago...
...A phrase of Walt Whitman's comes to mind...
...This did not merely mean that I would learn...
...T was angry because of cruelty, because of the exploitation of some men and women by others, because of the coldness with which some people manipulate others, because of dirt, poverty, ignorance, aggressiveness, and the other things which ruin and sadden human live...
...We swim well or badly in this sea of time...
...In those days...
...They saw so little of the beauty and wonder of the world...
...It meant that I would have prestige, that girls would be more impressed with me, that I would have status...
...the manner in which the feelings of human beings freeze toward one another...
...We, in our day, can only honor and continue this heritage...
...Remembrances of beauty and grandeur are in my mind...
...The tragedies of men and women often loom large in his mind...
...Each day remains new and fresh...
...I sat on the campus grass of the University of Chicago near the Commons and the Reynolds Club...
...I know that many of the dreams of that day have been realized...
...I have traveled long, hard days, and then, on arriving at some destination??Zurich, or Chicago, or Delaware, Ohio, or Nice, or Toulouse, or San Sebastian ??I have sat down, picked up the thread of what I was working on, and gone on with it...
...Sometimes, the writer is acutely aware of this...
...There is blank paper onto which he must put some of his feeling??in a sense, some of his blood...
...Robert Morss Lovett, then a professor, told me that Fadiman had a reputation for picking writers...
...And as they are wonderful in all their changes, so is life wonderful...
...This was, in fact, one of the most thrilling and exciting days of my life...
...I have been privileged to swim in it now for almost fifty years...
...For almost two years, I have had this feeling that I was beginning a second career...
...His most recent work is The Face of Time, published by the Vanguard Press...
...I would become somebody...
...This does not cease with youth...
...at times, it has been very lonely...
...I recalled the days when I was poor and almost unknown in Paris...
...Over and over again, I told myself that I was a student at the University of Chicago...
...When I was young, I knew that I must become a writer or nothing...
...And I think of Yeats again...
...My first piece of fiction, a sketch called "Slob," had been published in a little magazine named Blues, edited from Columbus, Mississippi by Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler...
...One of America's leading novelists discusses the forces that have shaped his life Reflections at Fifty By James T. Farrell There is a certain sadness in the passage of time, in the accumulation of the years of one's life...
...My friend Mary Hunter was with me...
...a second constant has been the awareness of the fact that there is no retribution...
...It is Carl Sandburg's city of the big shoulders, and it is my city...
...Around supper time??I ate on the job??I recited poetry of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam...
...Rock and sand changed colors as the day dramatically died, as the colors of the sky changed and increased the cast of softening glow upon them...
...I have written in my various homes, in hotel rooms, in airplanes and on trains, in airports and railroad stations, in parks, cafes and restaurants, and hospitals...
...About six or seven years ago...
...There I was, a curly-haired, bespectacled, stocky youth in my dirty overalls, rushing out, putting the nozzle of the hose into gasoline tanks, turning the handle of the Wayne pump, climbing down into the drain pit to drain crank cases, lifting the hoods of the cars...
...It stimulates my ambition and it strengthens the stoicism which is at the root of my outlook or experience...
...In certain moods, I think of writing as the loneliest profession a man can choose...
...I have tried to participate in political life as one who would help to improve the condition of men and women...
...No man is completely tranquil, I suspect, and I know that I am not...
...I have fought battles with others against Communism and reactionaries...
...The sense of alienation of my childhood and youth has not been completely eliminated from my nature...
...There has been joy, too, and, at times, love...
...Then, I dreamed of writing...
...Yet, I was full of dreams, perspectives and a great personal hope...
...I feel this way as I write, and I felt this way as a youth...
...A constant factor in my thinking and my feeling has been the acceptance of the impermanence of everything...
...To man, this was all waste...
...I carry them in my memory...
...I have written millions of words, and I have just published my twenty-seventh book...
...There was a grandeur of desolation in the mountains and deserts...
...A certain loneliness, tension and strain, a living in the sorrows and the joys of others as well as of oneself??these are part of the price tag of a life of writing...
...I dreamed of all of the books I would write...
...The deserts and mountains of the American West, the Alps and the Pyrenees, a midnight sun above the glaciers of the Arctic Circle, and what man has created, Carcassone, and Sainte Chapelle in Paris, the cathedral of Notre Dame de Chartres and Greco's Toledo, the skylines of New York and Chicago as our section of the earth turns away from the sun, Michelangelo's Moses and the Victory of Samothrace, Mona Lisa and the portraits of Velasquez in the Prado of Madrid??these and endless other wonders and beauties...
...I, too, spit into the face of time, even though I am aware that this is merely a symbolic expression of a mood: Time slowly transfigures me just as it transfigures all of us...
...I registered in Bartlett Gymnasium...
...Students passed us, hatless lads and girls in their summer dresses...
...He walks in crowds and there is part of himself separated from everyone in these crowds...
...There is no winning and losing...
...my mood as I write is melancholy...
...there is only self-realization or a future in which to realize oneself...
...To me, impermanence renders everything good and beautiful all the more rare...
...I would learn everything, and I would do everything...
...There is no Emersonian compensation and no Hegelian abstract justice...
...I have done many things in my life...
...Much that I wanted to see I have seen...
...I had, on that day, snatched and held aloft in my own hand the Torch of Learning...
...At times, the waters have been cold, and the waves have been fierce...
...Mary took what I said very seriously and made comments...
...There is no real surcease, no complete relaxation of tension, no end to it...
...And time passes, the minutes pass like a crowd moving by...
...And on that spring night in 1952, thinking of all this, I realized that all of those books had been written and that I was, in a sense, beginning anew...
...Often I think of this, and of a line of Yeats, whose poetry has been one of my lifelong admirations: "The wrong of unshapely things is a wrong ton great to behold...
...At the time, I was not familiar with William James's phrase, "the open universe," but life was, then, an "open universe" to me...
...Here were stories of a life now dead...
...Outside of Chicago there is Calvary Cemetery, where my own people lie for eternity...
...I have unmade and remade my life more than once, and I am doing this all over again as I slide into my fiftieth year...
...He had left us his legacy...
...I was depressed...
...There is no security in an insecure world...
...To understand it, to love it, to make it a little better, and to accept its buffetings as best we can and swim against them, knowing that we swim on and out toward a horizon we can never reach??this is all we can do...
...In the garden outside my window, many leaves have turned...
...Life is pouring itself through him, and he is always grained with this life...
...I hear the chirping birds...
...I have, at times, abandoned as many as a thousand or twelve hundred pages of a novel in progress and begun all over again from scratch...
...In the spring of 1952, I sat alone at the Cafe Deux Magots on a chilly evening, thinking, gazing at the old scaffolded tower of the Abbey of St...
...Another of my lifelong admirations is Guy de Maupassant...
...It must be re-shaped, pressed out of him...
...So there I was, asked by a publisher if I had a long manuscript after the publication of my very first piece of fiction...
...It was on a sunny Saturday morning...
...I walked across Washington Park??which has figured so much in my life and in my writing??and on to the University...
...I went to work that Saturday afternoon, in the gasoline filling station at Forty-second and Michigan Avenue, in an almost exalted state of mind...
...It was a scene of continuing but forbidding beauty...
...There is no retribution in life...
...I pondered on some of these stories, on the coldness with which some of the de Maupassant characters treat one another, the cruel and unfeeling way in which love affairs are broken up...
...I have recounted elsewhere how this gave me the germ of the idea that grew into Studs Lonigan...
...My feelings are somewhat different today as I write...
...She is a Broadway director now...
...Germain des Pres...
...Again, the waters have been calm and blue...
...At times, this has been joyful...
...Each day is a dawn of promise...
...There is an empty chair somewhere, waiting for him...
...I have come to see that pain and agony are part of the way it is in life...
...Moody, I sat in the big, noisy plane and gazed out of the window...
...The scars of a crowded life are not all dim and scarcely visible...
...When I first began to write, I was full of indignation because of the sorrows of this world...
...We can only learn and feel from the stories of the sadness of the past, and out of that we can learn to see and feel a little better about our own lives...
...I had already written my story, "Studs," for a composition class of James Weber Linn...
...They and many like them gave their blood and muscles in the building and growing of that city...
...I also spoke to myself in swollen phrases out of Carlyle...
...the single solitary soul...
...Paris and Chicago are the key cities of my life...
...There is, however, an emotional and moral price tag on everything...
...In other moods, I think it is the most wonderful one...
...And I was, at the moment, seeing more of it...
...I remembered my Paris past...
...There was the vast light brown sand of the desert, the grandeur of the mountains...
...There was an almost death-like beauty in this scene...
...I talked with Mary and got her advice on the letter I would write to Fadiman...
...There is no final home on a planet where we are homeless children...
...I look forward and I remember backward, and my old hopes rise anew, my old ambitions take on a new dress...
...Three years ago, I was flying to California...
...Approaching the age of 50...
...These are some of my thoughts and feelings as I think of my fiftieth birthday...
...It was savage, empty of human cultivation and living...
...I gazed and gazed...
...Here is the last Athens that has so far been created by man...
...By September of that year, I had written hundreds of pages, including many of the scenes which appear in Young Lonigan and The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan...
...I dreamed of becoming a lawyer, a public man, a teacher, as well as a writer...
...In different ways, we find a sense of security, of permanence or of home??for a while...
...At the time, one of the few books I had read was Sartor Resarlus...
...It is no longer the romantic promise of some enormous love, of some joy that is beyond understanding...
...I think of two episodes in my life??one when I had just passed 21, the other when I was 25...
...Characters like those of dc Maupassant were dust, and so were the remains of this great artist...
...The restless temperament of my youth has not been remade completely...
...I wrote to Kip Fadiman, and I began working...
...And as I realize this, I hear the clock ticking away...
Vol. 37 • January 1954 • No. 4
