FARRELL'S LOVES AND HATES
Meyer, Ernest L.
Farrell's Loves And Hates THE LEAGUE OF FRIGHTENED PHILISTINES, by James T. Farrell. Vanguard Press. $2.75. Reviewed by Ernest L. Meyer THE author of the Studs Lonigan and Danny O'Neill sagas...
...In 2 pungent essays Farrell departs from books to take the hide off Hollywood, finding that almost all motion pictures are compounded of an outer impressive-ness and an inner emptiness...
...Farrell's own literary credo is perhaps best summed up in the concluding lines of his essay on "Literature and Ideology...
...This in itself is the basic justification of literature in any period...
...His loves: Anton Chekhov, Theodore Dreiser, the early Ernest Hemingway, Mark Twain, Ring Lardner, James Joyce, Dostoievsky, and those other writers whose work measures up to Farrell's dictum that "a book stands the test of time when we can translate its meaning into the experience of our own time and see that it remains significant and alive...
...He writes: "Serious literature is one of the most powerful means contrived by the human spirit for examining life...
...His hates: Van Wyck Brooks, Lewis Mumford, Waldo Frank, Archibald MacLeish, and those other pen-pushers of philistia who, Farrell says, "borrow the reverent awe which we give to the great men of the past and use it as a means of blinding people to present realities, not only in letters but also in life...
...Reviewed by Ernest L. Meyer THE author of the Studs Lonigan and Danny O'Neill sagas here records with no pulling of punches his private hates and loves in a series of brief essays on literature and the critics...
...This is the answer that the artist can confidently hurl back at all Philistines who fear to permit the examination of life...
Vol. 9 • September 1945 • No. 36
