Perchance to Dream: The World of James T. Farrell

By Tim Weldon
Special to The Irish American Post

Upon hearing of the assassination of President Kennedy, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then executive assistant secretary of labor, commented:

I don’t think there’s any point in being Irish if you don’t know the world is going to break your heart eventually.

Perhaps no author of the Irish-American experience expressed as plainly, as prolifically, the broken-heartedness of the Irish in America than Chicago’s perennial South-Sider, James T. Farrell (1904-1979). 

Farrell’s productivity is legend. Spurred on by what an acquaintance described as an 8 a.m. to midnight writing schedule, Farrell authored 50 volumes of fiction, 250 published short stories, poetry, and several volumes of critical writing (he produced 75 book reviews in 1933 alone). 

Farrell’s fiction earned many labels, among them: naturalism, minimalism, aesthetic realism, proletarian literature, and immigrant literature. He was also the recipient of varied criticism. In a 1968 interview with Chicago Sun Times journalist Roger Ebert, Farrell told the then reporter, "One thing pleased me: Time called me the worst writer in America. I take that as a great distinction." Of greater distinction was Farrell’s being awarded in 1979 the Emerson-Thoreau award for distinguished achievement in literature. 

With his achievements, his millions of words, Farrell provided a platform for contemporary Irish-American expression. As Charles Fanning, the renowned commentator of Irish-American letters reminds us: "With his body of work, Farrell single-handedly brought the Irish voice into 20h century American fiction."

It is at the heart of 20th century American fiction that we find Farrell’s best and most famous work, The Studs Lonigan Trilogy (1932-1935).

The epigraph of the novel, lyrics from Blake and Lawlor’s 1894 song, Sidewalks of New York, set the theme for much of Farrell’s fiction:

East side, West side,
All around the town,
The tots sing ring-a-rosie,
London Bridge is falling down.
Me and Mamie O’Rourke,
We tripped the light fantastic,
On the sidewalks of New York.

For Farrell this was the song, the dream of America’s city Irish: the wonder of the fresh world of skyscrapers and bridges (some of the same structures they helped to build) was theirs to revel in, if they only could.

Studs Lonigan begins with a 14-year-old William (Studs) Lonigan locked in a bathroom, smoking and rapt in reverie: he is leaving St. Patrick’s grammar school and his love from afar, Lucy Scanlan. "Once when he had been in the sixth grade, he had walked home with Lucy, " Farrell wrote in the opening pages. Herein, it’s downhill. Even while walking with Lucy, Studs understands that with the onset of evening, "the day would get blacker." As would his short life.

Studs wasn’t dreaming alone. Also in the opening pages of the novel is Studs’ father, Patrick J. Lonigan, who "with reverie-lost eyes," is daydreaming on the back porch of the family’s middle class home. 

The elder Lonigan longs for his youth, wishes to see Ireland and contemplates perfect love and a perfect life, all the while humming Little Annie Rooney and My Irish Molly O. Personal and occupational ruin await him. With her husband’s business failure, so goes the dream of ascendancy to lace-curtain status for Mary Lonigan, and worse, her pain at Studs’ failure to enter the priesthood.

The starker ruin of prostitution and prison and alcoholism and early death on the one hand, and compromised and broken dreams on the other, await many of Farrell’s characters in the Lonigan trilogy and throughout his fiction.

In his short story, Mary O’Reilly, the protagonist dreams of religious life:

She had spent long hours in wishful contemplation of joining them (the Poor Clares), of escaping from the hurting continuities of everyday existence into a quiet that seemed like an endless summer evening’s swoon. 

Farrell’s following sentence says everything: "But she had never entered the convent." Farrell’s writing leaves a trail of the brokenhearted and downright broken: Mary O’Reilly never took her vows, Patrick J. Lonigan never saw Ireland, his wife never got her Gold Coast residence, and Stud’s never saw 30 -- let alone love with Lucy Scanlan. Reminiscent of his walk with the Lucy years before, Studs’ last words were: "Mother, it’s getting dark."

The inclination of the Irish-American, the immigrant, to dream and the often evanescent nature of dreams set against the harshness of city life was accompanied by a related theme in Farrell’s work, the fragmentation of the Irish neighborhood. As early as 1932, Farrell was to write in a letter about the final volume of Studs Lonigan, that a "dominant theme of the sequel will be the decay of the neighborhood."

The grandson of Irish immigrants (Co. Tipperary), the Chicago of Farrell’s writing, the streets of 58th and Indiana (the Washington Park neighborhood), were predominantly Irish. Farrell in fact described himself as "Chicago born, and American, but also an Irishman." In the 1960’s he wrote "the effects and scars of immigration are upon my life." 

But the concentration of Irish in Farrell’s neighborhood during his lifetime was short-lived. With their upward mobility, the wane of Irish immigration to Chicago which peaked before 1870, the migration of blacks from the American South to Chicago’s South Side, Irish flight to other parts of the city and suburbs and the rest of the country was ongoing. And as Farrell was to emphasize in his fiction, the spiritual brokenness of the person, in this case the Irish Catholic of the working class, followed the collapse of the neighborhood. 

In his 1926 short story, Studs (upon which the trilogy is based), Farrell, using the character of writer Danny O’Neill (Farrell’s alter ego), wrote "My associations with the corner gradually dwindled. I went to college and became an atheist."

In 1948, Farrell revisited his old neighborhood (he left Chicago for New York in 1931) in the short story Kilroy Was Here. Again using the character of Danny O’Neill, the story is centered upon Danny’s dispirited tour of the old neighborhood and Danny’s, or Farrell’s, wistful conclusion, expressed here in a conversation a with a current resident:

This neighborhood was a world to me; now it’s only so many streets.

Streets empty of a Mamie O’Rourke or Lucy Scanlan. Streets that were no longer home because home was where the Irish lived, where they invested their dreams in each other and in the city. 

Farrell’s world is a vivid chronicle of the unfulfilled dreamer in a new world, a world where the pursuit of happiness was possible -- which made failure all the worse. Farrell’s fiction was a portrait of the pre-suburban as yet fully assimilated Irish focused upon and striving to translate the American dream into their cultural language, with its emphasis on Catholicism, the family, civic obligations and political participation. That untold thousands in this group succeeded is history. Farrell wrote of and for the Irish who didn’t. 

As someone who made it out of his Washington Park neighborhood, Farrell never left it, clinging spiritually to its Irishness -- his Irishness -- as the source of his creativity and inspiration to endure, hoping all along for the fulfilled dreams of others. It was near the end of My Days of Anger (1943) that he wrote of a Danny O’Neill who "would do battle so that others did not remain unfulfilled as he and his family had been."

As the voice of the dreaming immigrant and their sons and daughters, Farrell’s influence was and remains far-reaching. 

It was from the title of Farrell’s chief work that Chicagoan Louis Terkel, the voice of the social left in America for decades, borrowed the name Studs. While in a recent interview with The Chicago Tribune, novelist Tom Wolfe wrote:

My whole picture of writing comes from Chicago, from Farrell…Many writers my age will, I bet, tell you the same thing. Farrell had a tremendous influence on young writers. He was galvanizing.

Fellow novelist Pete Hamill, urban, Irish and from an era different than Farrell’s, maintains a special affinity for Farrell and his work, both for its educating quality and likeness to his own experience: "He (Farrell) taught me and other city writers to look with pity and terror and compassion at the people we knew and at ourselves, to give value to the casualties 

of the urban wars, to speak in some way for those who have no voices." 

Andrew Greeley, Chicago’s own author and scholar of the Irish experience in America, dedicated a chapter to Farrell’s most famous character in his sociological study, That Most Distressed Nation: The Taming of the American Irish (1972). 

In the chapter, "The South Side since the Death of Studs," Greeley discusses the plight of Chicago’s remaining majority-Irish neighborhood, Beverly (According to the 2000 Census, 56% of Beverly’s residents listed their ancestry as Irish). In his discussion, Greeley theorizes that: "He (Studs) would have bought a home in Beverly and moved to Christ the King Parish, finding at 93rd and Hoyne a community where the old loyalties of 58th and Indiana could be born again." 

Perhaps the greatest tribute to Farrell came from his heir apparent, the Pulitzer-prize winning author William Kennedy. In the opening pages of his Ironweed, Kennedy has his protagonist come across a grave marked "FARRELL" which is curiously placed next to grave marked "KENNEDY."

In this centennial year of Farrell’s birth it is no small wonder that his work remains the subject of inspiration, of critical study, of representation of American 20th century literature. 

Today, the fiction of James T. Farrell serves as a tribute to the enduring dreams of the Irish in America, their love for each other and love of country, worthy topics in themselves. As the often elegant William Kennedy reminds us in his novel Very Old Bones (1993): "Nobody loves you like an Irishman." 
 
 

Note: In celebration of the Centennial of his birth, The Library of America will republish the Studs Lonigan trilogy in 2004. The American University of Paris is also hosting a James T. Farrell Centennial conference June 17-19.

 

Tim Weldon is department chair at the University of St. Francis in Joliet, Ill. He has written on aesthetics, philosophy and politics. He and his wife Clodagh, department chair of theology at Dominican University, live in suburban Chicago. He can be reached at TWeldon@stfrancis.edu