James T. Farrell

From Philosopedia

Farrell, James Thomas (27 February 1904 - 22 August 1979)

When Farrell, the Chicago author, wrote the Studs Lonigan trilogy (1932—1935), Catholics were incensed by his literary naturalism and descriptions of the Church. They would have been even more irritated had they known Farrell married Nora Kaye when she was fourteen or so. This he told Gore Vidal but never listed her as his wife in Who’s Who. The marriage was annulled, and later Kaye became ballet master Antony Tudor’s principal interpreter. Farrell became one of the best and best-known novelists of his decade. When Warren Allen Smith asked him about "humanism" he responded,

• I am struck by the names you list as among the supporters of naturalistic humanism: John Dewey, Thomas Mann, Lewis Mumford [in his Who's Who in Hell. Smith later removed Mumford when, in correspondence, Mumford agreed that he was a “holistic,” not a naturalistic or scientific or secular, humanist]. There is much in Mann and Mumford which decidedly runs counter to Dewey’s views. I wonder if you have stated the position of naturalistic humanism too broadly and generally for it to be meaningful? My contribution to the Partisan Review symposium on religion, published last summer (15 March 1951), indicates my views. I was a Catholic until I was twenty-one. I don’t have any violent feelings about it, and if people want to believe, it is their business. As for Mumford, he is just mixed up and obscurantic. I fear you are too concerned with a category here. What is the precise content of public conduct of some of those whom you mention? Mann is a naturalistic humanist or isn’t he? But he accepts honors from the East German puppet government of the Russian slave masters. Corliss Lamont for years has defended the crimes of Stalin. The consequences of action and the conduct of men must be the measure here, in the Deweyean sense. In his History of Materialism, Lange (the nineteenth-century German scholar) remarked that, in his view, the influence and ideas of Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates marked a regression in thought. Then, he remarked to the effect that men went on having insight, and they thought that their insights were necessarily derivable from these ‘regressive’ thinkers. He added that when the great progressive thought of an epoch wears thin and goes down, men go on having insights, and then, they believe that their insights, the truths they discover, are necessarily linked with regressive ideas. There is a point here. People think their beliefs and their formal ideas necessarily give them the clue to truth and insight. It isn’t always the case. Insights and conduct are often in contradiction with beliefs and with ideas, formally held.

In 1958, Farrell added to Smith

• Camus is a humanist––a fine and honest spirit, more so this than a thinker.

- a Farrell letter sent postage due from 85th to 103rd Street

Farrell’s experiences as a baseball enthusiast and a pupil of Catholic schools served as the basis of Young Lonigan (1932), which cartoonist-writer Jules Feiffer and many others claim was their first memory of reading a “forbidden book.” In that novel, Farrell describes the young William Lonigan, nicknamed Studs, who plays baseball and basketball, smokes secretly, fights, Jew-baits, shoplifts, and experiments with sex. The various characters include Father Gilhooley, gang members, a middle-aged homosexual, and one gang member who deserts the gang when his girlfriend refuses him simply because he is a Jew. Farrell, a master of literary naturalism, describes with sociological thoroughness what a squalid urban environment does to its inhabitants. Tommy Gallagher’s Crusade (1939) tells of a boy’s joining a priest’s anti-Semitic campaign. Silence of History (1963) describes Eddie Ryan, who loses his faith in Catholicism.

The Catholic hierarchy was expectedly “underwhelmed” by Farrell’s fiction. In addition to many novels, Farrell wrote A Note on Literary Criticism (1936), describing his Marxist views, Literature and Morality (1947), and My Baseball Diary (1957).

In The Humanist, Farrell reviewed MacLeish’s J.B. He was not nearly so favorable as John Ciardi in his Saturday Review of Literature critique. Farrell complained that Ciardi exaggerated by claiming that the book represents “the birth of a classic.” Farrell found MacLeish’s humanism was posed in terms of despair, and he preferred the humanistic outlook of Bertrand Russell’s A Free Man’s Worship.

In 1933, Farrell had invented a satiric alter-ego, Jonathan Titulescu Fogarty, Esq., through whom he delivered many of his biting social and political commentaries. He was active politically, an ally of the Socialist Workers Party. He attended and lecturing at several international conferences, including the Berlin Conference for Cultural Freedom (1950) and the Paris Conference for the Mobilization of Peace (1949). At the latter, he delivered a speech entitled, "Truth and Myth about America."

Farrell died of a heart attack at his home in New York City. He had published more than 65 volumes in his lifetime, including 26 novels and novellas, 15 collections of short tories, and more than 10 books of criticism and collected essays.

Correspondence

See Farrell's correspondence to The Humanist about humanism.

(See a review of Farrell's book about H. L. Mencken.)

{CE; HNS; WAS, 15 August 1951 and 21 March 1958}