The Lost World of James T.

Farrell's Short Stories

Author(s): Barry O'Connell
Source: Twentieth Century Literature , Feb., 1976, Vol. 22, No. 1, James T. Farrell Issue
(Feb., 1976), pp. 36-51
Published by: Duke University Press

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/441041

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 The Lost World of
James T. Farrell's
Short Stories

BARRY O'CONNELL

... Across the seas

At the bottom of the world, where Childhood
Sits on its desert island with Achilles
and Pitamakan, the White Blackfoot....
Randall Jarrell, "The Lost World"

James T. Farrell can be an easy mark for a critic. His faults and his
failures have often been attacked and are, as we shall see, only too obvious
Many of his some 250 short stories and roughly twenty-two novels are inferior
pieces of literature and sometimes embarrassingly bad. At his best, however,
in a number of the short stories and in Studs Lonigan, he renders accessible to
us a world which we might otherwise never encounter. And for the
Irish-Americans among us, indeed perhaps for all those Americans from an
ethnic or racial minority, were it not for his voice it would be harder to take
the first necessary steps toward a recognition of what we have been, a
recognition without which we could not begin to understand what we have
become, or to imagine what we might yet be.
I intend to venture in this essay an assessment of Farrell's achievement,
using his short stories, particularly the stories about Irish-Catholics on the
South Side of Chicago where Farrell grew up.' Farrell has written about
other experiences and has created other fictions, but none of them equals in
the mass of observed detail or in intensity of feeling his stories about Chicago
Irish-Americans. More importantly, his experience of Irish-Catholic life in
Chicago has persistently occupied Farrell throughout his long career; how he
makes sense in his fiction of this experience defines his practice, even when he

36

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 FARRELL'S SHORT STORIES 37

is working from the materials of

Farrell's short stories are shap
when they are not directly about
are adolescents; others are preo
with regret, their present con
Farrell typically, and often unint
as they would be perceived by an
times as authority figures, at oth
story is far removed from the ex
perceived similarly. They are mo
portraits made by someone either
illusion of dimension, or without
fully as to that of adolescence. H
while he is surprisingly tone d
emotional states precisely, succ
tions.2
Even Farrell's failures can tea
but about the world he comes f
world as though it were in a pa
present. At times his ability to
patterns of adolescent perceptio
the central experience behind
Irish-American community in
communities of our childhood b
intense as Farrell's.
The Irish-American community, as Farrell perceives it, forces upon its
children, at a crucial point near adulthood, an absolute submission to its
assumptions about the world. The refusal to submit brings a summary
banishment from the life of the community. The banishment is made the
more cruel by the insistence of the loyalists that the recalcitrant few are
wilfully betraying the community and their loved ones. The effect of the
banishment on Farrell is that he writes about all his experience as though he
were just at the border of it. He is an expatriate, alternately blaming himself
for his exile and making his homeland fully responsible. He sees himself
separated from the world which nurtured him by an insurmountable barrier.
A return to it would entail the death of his imagination; continued exile
means being forever outside another way of life.
The nature of this experience forces him to be, almost invariably,
self-conscious before the materials of his fiction. He is thus, in his short stories
as well as in his novels, essentially an autobiographical writer. He cannot
assume a sympathetic audience who share a world of meaning with him. As a

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 38 TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERA TURE

result his writing often verges on being

accurately, perhaps, he attempts as nearl
life into fiction. It is as though he seeks t
"facts" of the world, before he can allow
Indeed, Farrell's stories are usually less p
Danny O'Neill, a barely disguised figure
writing in an apologia at the end of Boar
with all the standard ingredients. It is
some bits of life lived, and of thoughts t
bring both together" (p. 210).
The autobiographical materials Farrel
individual's inner life (as they are, for
Miller). Instead, he attempts to chronicle
is sociological, rather than (if the distinc
In such fiction the writer commonly
characters, even when he presents tha
tation implies a world of alien or exotic
Farrell consciously stands apart from h
hand" in the very structure of most
revealing the alienation he feels. It nea
of the world.
Farrell is often criticized for his literalness. Characters and incidents in
his fiction are taken, little changed, from the events of his own life. His stories
and novels can be read as a continuous roman i' clef. Farrell acknowledges this
in an important defense of his practice in the preface to Childhood Is Not
Forever, a late collection of stories:
My use of an autobiographical character can be considered
functional. Or, it can be called a device. The social and
geographical areas that I am introducing into my fiction are
too extended, too full of contrasts, too numerous for me to
achieve unity in the whole body of my fiction by any other
means. To impose unity by principle or theory, by a political
or philosophic conviction, would be dogmatic and didactic.
But with an autobiographical character, I can achieve a unity
of association. (p. viii)
Farrell's justification of so mechanical a principle, potentially as
dogmatic in the making of fiction as political or philosophical convictions,
suggests the faults common in much of his writing. Stories are often too long
because the material for them has been insufficiently worked on by his
imagination. They sometimes have the formlessness of an arbitrarily edited
transcript. His narrative voice can be too explicit, anxiously telling the reader

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 FARRELL'S SHORT STORIES 39

"everything" he needs to know.

into, banalities about ordinary e
narrator or his protagonist are rar
These failures are evident to an
concern is not with them, thoug
fiction too directly from autobi
fully, Farrell inevitably engages in
just the reproduction, of charac
experience when we attempt to dis
sense that he introduces a range of "social and geographical areas"
(implicitly ones new to American literature) is crucial to this task. His claim
indicates his major ambition as a writer: the approximation in fiction of what
he takes to be the already existent reality of a little-known Irish-American
world.
My comments should suggest some of the difficulties involved in the
creation of a chronicle of a minority ethnic culture. These difficulties are
compounded when the writer is, like Farrell, the first member of his ethnic
group to assume this role. In this context the very act of writing is analogous
to being an anthropological informant. The writer must simultaneously share
the assumptions of his own culture and dissociate himself from them. He may
be expelled from his group if he reveals his ability to separate himself from it.
Like the informant, he belongs, finally, neither to his native culture nor to the
one he reports it to. He takes on the burdens of cosmopolitanism with few of
its benefits. For those who depend upon him for their knowledge of his
culture there is the difficulty of judging the adequacy of his revelations.

As Farrell composes his chronicle in the short stories he presents an

extraordinary range of life and work experiences at nearly every stage in the
life cycle within an urban Irish-American community. The stories constitute
a comprehensive sociological survey of a community. Sexual mores, work
habits, education, the role of religion, the nature of leadership, patterns of
courtship and marriage, modes of child-rearing, deviance, and the nature of
status distinctions are revealed in one story or another. But, as I have
suggested, these institutions are usually regarded through the eyes of
adolescence. The members of the gang from 51st Street and Prairie, familiar
to readers of Studs Lonigan, appear in most of the stories: Studs himself
occasionally, Danny O'Neill, Red Kelly, Phil Rolfe, Paulie Haggerty, Phil
Garrity. When they are absent from a story the cityscape remains theirs; the
characters who take their place are familiar figures in their lives. They
themselves are only off-stage, likely to reappear at any moment.
In some of the stories the focus is the older generation: a genteel

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 40 TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERA TURE

lace-curtain family in "The Hyland F

decent lives for their children as
Payday," the nuns and priests who dom
life so central in an Irish-Catholic co
hooley," "The Little Blonde Fellow," "The Bride of Christ," "Father
Timothy Joyce," "Sister"; and the old and dying like "Mary Reilly." In
others, the subject is generational conflict, the stories most central to Farrell's
canon and often his best: "The Only Son," "Saturday Night," "Oratory
Contest," and "All Things Are Nothing to Me." Some stories take place at
work: the teamsters and dispatchers at the Continental Express Co. furnish
the cast for a major group of Farrell stories, as do the gas station attendants
for the Nation Oil Co.
These categories identify only the external dimensions of the lives in
Farrell's Irish-American world. By themselves they tell us nothing about his
conception of his people's inner worlds. Regardless of differences in age, or
status, or occupation, Farrell's characters inhabit remarkably similar emo
tional worlds. The content of their lives varies little. Farrell's characters spen
most of their time creating fantasies. It is, in fact, their major activity; all o
living itself is subordinated to it. He creates a community of peaple who live
through their dreams, or with regrets for the defeat of those dreams. It is a
community in which the present disappears in the anticipation of the future
or under the weight of the memory of dead dreams. Life itself never qui
begins.
Whatever the form, the dreams are invariably about being "somebody,"
a person of importance. In childhood one may dream of winning the affection
of the prettiest girl on the block as in "Helen, I Love You," or of outfighting
everyone else in the gang, or of growing up to be a great athlete. One's
activity in the world, and the world itself, is always subordinated to the
richness of an imagined place in an imaginary world.
The most pervasive dreams involve sexual conquest. In them one's
importance and self-respect depend upon the quality of one's conquests. The
few successful conquests in the stories are overwhelmed by a barely
interrupted flow of fantasy. In "Scarecrow," an early and melodramatic tale,
a pathetically ugly fourteen-year-old called "Scarecrow" and "Miss Nickel
Nose" by the other kids makes herself available to any boy who will have her.
Her sexual experiences sustain a dream life in which she will someday
become "the beautiful wife of a handsome millionaire ... a beautiful queen
in a beautiful palace" (Calico Shoes, p. 19). Her ugliness and terrible loneliness
are subsumed in a magnificent fantasy life, her only sustenance and the fatal
disguise of her disintegration. Like most of Farrell's characters her fantasies
are her only possessions.

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 FARRELL'S SHORT STORIES 41

Sexual fantasies in Farrell

man's imaginary conquest of
a magnificent self-transform
this typically Farrellian situ
rich virtuous girl who rated."
tries "to stand ... like a young
and done things, who rated"
Jazz-Age Clerk," uses his lun
some gorgeous "sheba," all the
faded quickly" and the old, gr
by going into the lobby of t
imagines being paged "and it
to close an important deal....
mama ... . some hot movie
awakes to reality, the outco
realization of the lowliness of his station.
As people grow older the kinds of dreams change. Some continue to
dream of exalting the self through sexual conquest. Others, like Willie
Collins, the expressman who has risen to the high post of dispatcher, imagine
their superiority to their fellows, fret about the threatening hostility of the less
fortunate, imagine "others" waiting for the first chance to pull their betters
down. Willie, for one, thus identifies himself with the rich and powerful: "he
imagined himself upstairs, moving about among the high muckety-mucks,
getting slapped on the back. But the continuous shouting drowned out his
dream; he gazed about in a daze" (Life Adventurous, p. 50). Although Willie
still dreams of sexual advances, the fantasies of economic advance preoccupy
him. On the night of Calvin Coolidge's election Willie (as a self-consciously
upwardly mobile Irish-American he is, of course, a Republican) imagines
himself, Chief Dispatcher that he is, as one with the new Chief of the Nation:
He resolved that from now on in his work, he, too, would be a
strong, silent man. He wouldn't blabber and gas with the
Route Inspectors. He would be quiet, dignified, strongly silent,
and he would impress them all.... Just think-he had almost
met Eddie Chance, had almost been taken up to headquarters
where he would have met the muckety-mucks. But, then, a
strong, silent man in whose soul the still waters ran deep could
bear such disappointments (Life Adventurous, p. 52).
"Had almost" again and again defines the experience of these people. And in
response to the repeated, almost predictable disappointments of their lives
they fantasize all the more strongly. When reality overpowers their imagi-
nations, as it usually does, they remember their old dreams and prepare to
die.

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42 TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERA TURE

Even the successful, by the standards o

preening themselves with images of t
Hylands in "The Hyland Family" wait in
other parishioners have left and then mak
the admiration of the waiting multitud
spiritual head of the community, dream
when he has built the most beautiful p
Monsignor and, surely, someday "Bisho
Few people can long sustain such fantas
and constantly defeated by life, as these a
most comic creations because no actuali
mine his imagination. Yet the comedy
self-delusions of a fool, not the triumph
In Farrell's stories aging is the process
acceptance of who one is, or in the satis
happy family life, but to regret and bewi
age comes early for most of his character
"Things ain't like they was" (Guillotine
lament. School is barely done with, adu
which had been rich in fantasies about th
as the time of "being free and without re
214). A few people refuse to give up adolescence and avoid the awful
disillusions of adult life. Drink and talk with aging companions prolong
youth. Either way life is impoverished. ("Jo-Jo" and "Saturday Night" are
Farrell's most powerful stories about those who refuse to give up adolescence.)
Some transfer their dreams to their children. In "Jim O'Neill," one of
Farrell's best and most directly autobiographical stories, O'Neill looks back
on his life with more measured regret than most of Farrell's characters. He
takes pride in having survived, cherishes few illusions about his accom-
plishments-but one: "he was in a position to give his kids a better start in
the world than he had had" (Calico Shoes, p. 173). The story ends with a
recognition rare among the people Farrell creates: "he experienced a
moment of intense clarity, and he saw what kind of a fight his kids would
have, the same kind of struggle that he'd gone through" (Calico Shoes, p. 182).
His modest illusion drops away and he sees his life fully as it has been-an
unending struggle for a modicum of economic security and self-respect with
few, if any, victories. O'Neill's insight is rare in Farrell's world, but the
conditions of his life are not. Some people have greater margins of security, a
few live closer to the bottom, but these represent significant differences only
within the community. As one moves away from it they fade into an

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 FARRELL'S SHORT STORIES 43

impression of a mass of dism

When one survives life by m
sharing them. They are too
Farrell's people live extraordin
walls of solitude and frustrat
deepest fears and hopes fro
share only the enforced intim
share their troubles or take p
only melancholy memories. Fa
describes most of his characte
inter-acting on a basis of p
commonplaces" (Calico Shoes
There are no more lonely pe
a literature so often about isolation. The emotions and dreams Farrell
explores in his fiction are those of the lonely. People's sexual hungers, t
obsessions with status, express their separation from each other. The pr
nature of their isolation is conveyed by a scene which Farrell repe
several stories (as well as in a famous scene in Studs Lonigan). The charac
in this scene, looks into a mirror in order to discover how others see hi
motive reveals the inability of Farrell's people to possess any secure iden
apart from an almost narcissistic obsession with how others regard
Beyond the door of the family bathroom aliens and the hostile lurk
them one enjoys no companionship; without them one does not exist
The pervasiveness of fantasy tells us a good deal about the nature of
community. People do not work so hard to escape from the actualities of
lives when they have some foundation for self-respect. Economic securit
unusual, respectable status more so. The dreams of these Irish-Ame
articulate their awareness of being among the lowly in the United S
They are poor, Catholics in a Protestant society, a minority not so
despised as disregarded. They have few of the material symbols by whic
society measures people's worth. They respond to their exclusion by
attempting to prove their "all-Americanness" in fervent proclamations of
patriotism. Their rebellions are private and unpolitical, their lives all the
more diminished by their affirmations of a society which denies them.
Given the frailty of their own relationships, it is not surprising that
Farrell's characters see their community as constantly endangered. They
imagine themselves in a state of seige. The "eight-balls" and the "Hebes" are
the main threats. But the world is peopled by enemies-"Hunkies,"
"Polacks," "APAers," and even Republicans. The blacks will destroy the
neighborhood when they move into it. The Jews conspire with them. For the
most disaffected members of the community, like the hero of "Tommy

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 44 TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERA TURE

Gallagher's Crusade," the Jews are respons

frustrations. "They" account for one's lowly e
of blacks on the neighborhood (because to m
anyone), and the disdain other Americans h
The only unity the Irish-American comm
depicts it, is in defense against outsiders. But
boundaries of the neighborhood. Self-respect
each other as a means to it. They exploit t
downgrade the status of their neighbors an
ostentatious piety, a "bad" kid in the famil
material for finely elaborated hierarchies.
"high-hatting," of any gesture of nonconform
brings a quick condemnation as a rejection o
nity. The children's epithets name the fears
"sissy," "yellow". An absolute conformity
depends upon the enforcement of mediocrity
Farrell presents these internal wars in man
his best, suggests the poignance of the divisio
O'Neill and Jimmy English, meet in the p
because his parents are so poor that he must l
Jimmy, goofier yet, because his father deserte
cleaning lady. Jimmy vainly tries to make fr
fear that someone from the gang will see him
Families provide no better shelter. Generati
overt, is signified by the unconditionality of
order of their parents and Holy Mother Churc
immediate attack from fathers and siblings, a
Any expression of individuality is alway
community, an attempt to elevate oneself
Things Are Nothing to Me," "Monday Is A
Son" are the stories in which this warfare is m

Thus far I have left Farrell's stance toward the world he, at least
partially, creates, implicit. I want, for the remainder of the essay, to
illuminate as best I can what leads Farrell to make sense of this world in the
particular way he does. Leaving aside for now the question of the adequacy
of his revelation of this Irish-American world, it should be apparent that, for
Farrell, it is a pathological community. It impoverishes people beyond
material deprivation by preventing them from seeing or seizing the world
more richly or individually. Each is held back in the name of the other, to the
common damnation of all. Life is closed to questions and thus people are

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 FARRELL'S SHORT STORIES 45

doomed to the still-point of th

in this light, it becomes imper
The alternative is a willed res
desperate act of self-destructio
the community.
I referred earlier to this pr
Farrell's autobiography. It d
focuses on moments in the s
O'Neill tetralogy). "All Thing
Day," and "The Only Son" pro
stories date from the 1930s wh
and still living in Chicago. In t
Farrell did for a time, and h
causing bitter conflict within t
way: "he had the feeling of
museum" (Guillotine Party,
($1,000, p. 214).
They want to escape, but th
with parents and friends. The
available. But the community o
young men see it, nothing le
Nothing about the Church is to
in American society allowed.
hostility. They are trapped, fo
loved ones, the very fabric of t
leave they must be Ishmaels.
Homelessness is not the only
in college of how much of the world has been shut out from their
consideration has moved them toward expatriation. But, in each of these
stories, as the heroes engage in the critical confrontation, they realize how
much they have already lost: "he had become aware of the poverty in his
home life, his background, his people, a poverty not only of mind, but of
spirit, even a poverty of the senses... .And [that] he, too, had been afflicted
with this poverty" (Guillotine Party, p. 158). The choice they have is almost a
mockery. They can live apart from the community which nurtured them, but
they can never be free of it: "the world of Fifty-Eighth Street ... he would
always carry it with him, as a sense of pain, as a wound in his memory. And it
was stupid and prejudiced, and he no longer felt as if he fitted into it"
(Guillotine Party, p. 160).
Farrell's stories turn upon this recognition. They document this impov-
erishment even when Farrell allows himself to appreciate some of the people.

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 46 TWENTIETH CENTUR Y LITERATURE

His own failures as a writer add to the docu

taken as a whole, speak even more power
Americans have impoverished senses-and
any ornament, creates no memorable lan
physically distinguishable except as a gr
explore feelings. Does he create or merely r
is denoted? When he writes a story to sh
people he cannot do it without demonstratin
surely punished in the joylessness of their s
remained among the faithful.
In most of his stories Farrell does not achieve a narrative voice which
"fits into" the created world, nor, most of the time, is he able or willing to
create a world independent of that voice. His fictional world is literally one
he is apart from, but rarely sufficiently free of to give it a life of its own. Th
literal quality of his fiction reflects, at least in part, an imagination unable to
fully realize or re-create the experience which dominates it. The very
profligacy of Farrell's output suggests a man whose only way of resolving the
past is an obsessive recounting of every detail of it. His fiction affects us when
his emotional entanglement is so great that he forgets himself. Or, to put it
another way, his fiction works when Farrell's presence in it as a protagonist
draws him, and thus us, into a world, instead of determining our attitude to it
before we have experienced it. His most powerful effect, rarely concentrated
in a single story but manifest in the collectivity of the stories about his past, i
a sense of people entrapped beyond the possibility of liberation in a
community which denies their most fundamental needs.
The most dramatic expression of Farrell's own displacement is his
treatment of his characters. Few of them have any self-respect, fewer yet are
respected by their maker. In story after story Farrell's narrative voice
establishes his contempt, anger, sometimes even hatred for the characters. He
has a reportoire of verbal gestures which keep people "in their place". They
are often physically grotesque or caricatured: "[he had] a vertical face,
slightly pocked ... and ratty greenish eyes," "her swollen blob of a face ...
toothless gums and a sick, purplish and yellow-green tongue," "a middle-
aged woman with a reddish bovine face called ... for them to hit the black
skunks."4 Physical descriptions signal his attitude toward a character. Father
Gilhooley is "corpulently, contented." Red Kelly in middle age has "a
growing pot belly, and a sleek, shiny, puffed face" (Guillotine Party, p. 256).
These characterizations make the stories about the two men redundant
demonstrations of their smug self-satisfaction. His descriptions often make it
impossible to take the characters seriously. In "Honey, We'll Be Brave," a
story about a young married couple which ends with their discovery that the

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 FARRELL'S SHORT STORIES 47

wife has an hereditary venereal

in advance of the conclusion b
sleek, up-and-coming, ambitio
girl with blonde bobbed hair,
manners of maturity" (Calico
either cannot tolerate the po
characters, or does not trust hi
rejection of his own characters
account, of dissenters and outsi
These verbal gestures maintain
to the people whose lives he chr
gestures suggests a desperate ne
almost ruins one of his best sto
creates in it a convincing portr
his son is ashamed of him. The
father's consciousness. Farrell
sympathetic identification with
"[he realized] how Gerry must h
mother, a life they could never
The voice of the son, unheard be
Farrell's voice, of course, unab
parents feel at the loss of their
are unusual enough in Farrell
unmistakeable, I think, Farrell's
his own adolescence in the co
re-creation of the culture threa
Farrell is generally savage to
stories. They are, after all, th
Farrell found so suffocating.
sympathetically about adults i
"The Oratory Contest," "Jim
others. One can only imagine
tionably gains in power when h
which characters take on their own life.
His stories, in this reading, become a justification for his decision to leave
the community. They are frequently re-enactments of his sense that the
community "was stupid and prejudiced." In "Studs," the story out of which
the Lonigan trilogy grew, Danny O'Neill speaks for Farrell, I think, when he
characterizes the neighborhood gang as just a bunch of "slobs" whom "I grew
up contemptuous of." (Guillotine Party, p. 302). The stories prove the contempt.
The contempt diminishes as Farrell himself grows older. He is explicitly

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 48 TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERA TURE

able to see his childhood world with more und

"Childhood Is Not Forever," written in the
often remark a change of heart. But even a
bitterness can break through the surface. In
describes the diners in a Chicago restaurant
shed an atmosphere of prosperity. They had t
eaten many a thick steak and had poured ple
hatch" (Childhood, pp. 54-55). But it is in th
experiences after leaving his community that
exile. In most of them he transfers his contempt to a new cast of
characters-to the Communists in stories from the Forties like "The
Dialectic," "Comrade Stanley," "The Martyr," and "The Renegade";
the would-be artists and writers of his tales of the intellectual world, "M
and His Wife," "Summer Try-Out," "Edna's Husband". His satirical
intention in these stories is defeated by his uncontrollable scorn for his
subjects. They are unredeemed by the power of hatred or love, unlike most of
his Chicago stories. They succeed only in being spiteful.
Farrell's displacement from his native community often disables him as a
writer. But it also gives him a great subject. His particular address to it
through the eyes of adolescence makes him extraordinarily sensitive to the
dimensions of loneliness and regret in the lives of his people. For him
adolescence, for all its pains, was a privileged state. It was the time in his own
life when he both belonged to the community and began to question it. It was
the storehouse of experience he could most reliably draw upon to write, the
source of his revelations about the culture. Once he passed beyond it he was
cut off. The feeling of irretrievable loss, of impoverishment itself, which
underlies the emotional world of these stories expresses his own exile, as much
as it does the actual worlds of the real life counterparts for his characters. Life
stops for them with the end of adolescence just as, in some sense, it did for
Farrell.

His world of Irish-Americans is finally a partial one. Unlike Tillie Olsen,

for instance, a writer whose characters belong to a similar social world,
Farrell is rarely able to bring us within his people's inner lives. He cannot, as
Olsen does, help us experience the world as though we were the characters.
Nor can he create, as she does, adult characters with as emotionally complex
inner lives as those of the most cultivated Jamesian characters. We should
not, for that reason, conclude that the lives of lower-middle class Irish-
Americans replicate their lives in Farrell's fiction.
As he grows older the hold of his past weakens, but so too, as I have
indicated, does his ability to create fiction worth reading. The shortcomings
which flaw his earlier work become fatal to much of the later, unredeemed as

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 FARRELL'S SHORT STORIES 49

they are by his attachment

becomes boring, his distancing
the author himself seems almos
imposed a design of sorts on ma
later stories have only the form
but almost never compelling
conversation, the kind of con
moved by a need to make sense
meaning for them.
Even these failed stories tea
leaving a culture like Farrell's
the obsession with detail, no lo
leave-taking, becomes a disabili
nothing can be taken for grant
He acquires knowledge and accu
requires more deeply felt exper
Farrell is too astute a self-cri
of these criticisms. In a 1946 letter to H.L. Mencken he describes a stance
towards his work like the one I have depicted here: "as I recall my moods a
feelings when I wrote much of [my] fiction, I would feel so often outside of
material, and looking on... ." (in Branch, p. 19). His fullest description of h
situation is in another, well-known, letter from the mid-Forties:
[A writer from lowly origins] is brought up on banalities,
commonplaces, formal religious fanaticism, spiritual emptiness,
an authoritative educational system.... He usually has to work
his own way through college, and in doing so, he learns that
most of the talk about education is not meant except in the
sense of where it will get you. He sees things from the outside,
not the inside. And seeing them from the outside, he not only
acquires a different point of view than earlier writers like
Emerson and Henry James, but he also knows that he can't get
inside except by deforming his own nature and his impulses....
He doesn't begin with the complications which are the source
material of writers in a more sophisticated culture, and he
doesn't absorb forms and traditions. His subject matter is his
own world around him, and from that he gradually ex-
pands.... The feelings of alienation he meets sometimes make
him hardened, stubborn and resistant. He spends his youth in
struggling to get what a son of Groton acquires as if by natural
right (in Branch, p. 16).
One could simply note the defensive self-pity of this statement, interpr
it as the apologia of a writer aware of his failure to make art out of life, a

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 50 TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERA TURE

dismiss him. But to do so would be to den

statement, and from the fiction of the man w
novels are the most extensive documentary
process of separation from an ethnic culture.
the damages suffered, as writers and as pe
available in literature the experiences of an ex
behind is irretrievable and yet inescapable. Th
remaining, the anger and the defensivene
common in most ethnic writing-are unforget
work.
Those of us from racial and ethnic minorities in America who have had
the good fortune to grow up after such writers owe them a special debt.
Through their books we can find our feelings and experiences. They reflect
our world, give names to wordless feelings, and characterize our situations in
ways we can find no place else in American literature-at least not until our
Farrells free us to make the connections between our experience and that of
others from different backgrounds. These books create an imaginative space
within which we can see our ethnic pasts less grievously than their authors
must. Rightly read they can free us from the burden of isolation. Because of
them we may imagine a less drastic passage from our past to our present. And
we may escape the doom of being forever fixed in a lost world.

'Although I refer only to a minority of Farrell's short stories in this essay, my

account is drawn from a reading of all his collected stories, except those in Sound of a
City (New York: Paperback Library, 1962) which I was unable to obtain a copy of. I
have also used material from his novel, Boarding House Blues (New York: Paperback
Library, 1961). I found Edgar M. Branch's, James T. Farrell (New York: Twayne,
1971) useful, especially for bibliographic information. Citations from Branch appear
hereafter in the text as (in Branch, p. - ). I do not make direct use of Alfred
Kazin's criticism of Farrell's early work in On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern
American Prose Literature (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1942), pp. 379 ff., but he
remains Farrell's most astute critic and I am sure my insights are indebted to his.
Citations from the following collections of Farrell's short stories will be in the text
throughout: The Short Stories of James T. Farrell (New York: Vanguard, 1937), includes
the earlier collections-Calico Shoes, Guillotine Party, and Can All This Grandeur Perish; An
Omnibus of Short Stories (New York: Vanguard, 1957), includes $1,000 a Week, To Whom
It May Concern, and The Life Adventurous; When Boyhood Dreams Come True (New York:
Vanguard, 1946); An American Dream Girl (New York: Vanguard, 1950); French Girls
Are Vicious (New York: Vanguard, 1955); A Dangerous Woman (New York: Vanguard,
1957); Side Street (New York: Paperback Library, 1961); Childhood Is Not Forever
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969); Judith and Other Stories (Garden City, N.Y.:
Doubleday, 1973).
2Compare, for example, the marvelous exchange of taunts between Danny
O'Neill and Dick Buckford in "Helen, I Love You," Calico Shoes, pp. 3-14; with Frank

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FARRELL'S SHORT STORIES 51

O'Dair's struggles (which are Fa

Boarding House Blues, p. 124: "He
Sadness? Yes and yet not exactl
stillthis word didn't satisfy him
3There are innumerable exam
from "Clyde," an early story: "C
enormous city, sentimentalizing
city he had been baffled by a s
the crushing noises, the shouts o
pp. 156-57). Time and experien
selections from one of his latest
one that can go unfulfilled"; or
losing in love" (Judith, pp. 31, 5
seem to me irredeemably flawe
said that the very voluminousne
criticism.
4The quotations in order are fr
the Girls," Calico Shoes, p. 265; a

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