James T. Farrell's Exile Twice Over

One day in the Horseshoe Bar in the Shelbourne Hotel the late James T. Farrell and myself (having been introduced by Dave Hanly, then a winged Mercury or Ariel of the Tourist Board) were treating our drink as gentlemen should: he on brandy, myself on a native but no less health-giving fluid. He was then seventy and had just told me that back in the USA his doctor had warned him off spirits.

So very tentatively, because I am no man to come between another man and his legitimate pastime, I suggested to him that what he had in his hand was a glass, and a very large glass of spirits. Most unsmilingly, yet in no unfriendly fashion, he gazed at me a calm grey gaze and said: "Ben Kiely, I want to tell you something. Studs Lonigan always wanted to get drunk in the Shelbourne Hotel."

A person, not of quick humour, to whom I once told that story, said to me; "But Studs Lonigan never heard of the Shelbourne Hotel." Indeed and indeed, he may not have, but James T. Farrell, the creator of Studs Lonigan, had: and into that remark he put a lot of history. Son of Irish immigrants to Chicago drinks in the halls of the gentry or, at any rate, where the gentry used to drink when they were in it at all: in a hotel about which one of the greatest writers of the gentry, Elizabeth Bowen, wrote a book: a sort of supplement to Bowen's Court, the book she wrote about the square Roman house her people had set down on the Irish countryside.


Young Lanigan, the first volume of the Studs Lonigan trilogy was published in 1932, an annus mirabilis for Irish Catholicism: no misprint of that fine piece of Latin will be tolerated. G. K. Chesterton helped to carry the canopy in the Phoenix Park (I was there: aetatis 13), and asked for English "beah" in a Dublin pub at a time when the IRA or somebody was ordering us to boycott Bass: by contemporary standards, a harmless enough directive. Chesterton wrote afterwards that Ireland was "the last verdant outpost of Christianity": and across the wide Atlantic, and halfways across the North American continent, James T. Farrell began his long saga of Irish- American youth on the way to disaster and early death. A guy in the drug store near St. Patrick's grade school (run by the nuns) used to say when the students crowded in: "Ope look at! Hey, Charlie, here comes the higher Catholic education! Lock up the candy cases."


 

The coincidence in time is at least interesting. There is another. Studs Lonigan and his pals graduate from grade (primary) school in 1916. Graduation day has risen to the level of the day of first communion: the shanty Irish are on the way up. Father Gilhooley "floridly faced" his audience on that day of days: "And it will be an especially sacred and hallowed memory to you who are the fathers and mothers of the boys and girls in St. Patrick's banner class of 1916. It is you parents who have made this grand evening passable, who have suffered and worried and fretted, sacrificed, stinted yourselves luxuries, in order to send your children off to the good sisters where they might receive Catholic training. You have had your fears and your worries, sending these sturdy, well balanced, beloved and, yes, handsome children to school. But now these fears worries must be scattering like the dissipating before the warming of Gawd's golden morning sunlight.

 

In a stinking Chicago city-train, described, you might say, with little loving nostalgia, various people variously react to the news of the entry of the USA into the Kaiser war and: "A monkey-faced mick blubbered tears, whining that Padraic Pearse was dead, whoever that guy was." And the father of Studs Lonigan looks forward to the when the family will be reared and his wife can revisit the Old Land where the River Shannon is busy flowing, where John McCormack was and where the lakes of Killarney plain to be seen. The Wall Street is to shatter that dream.

 

Like the old mariner talking down the boyhood of Sir Walter Raleigh, Old Man O'Brien talks to Studs and to son, Johnny, about the great fight he had seen in action: Bob Fitzsimons, Jimmy Britt, Jim Jeffries, Gentleman Jim Corbett, "and don't think old Gentleman Jim didn't know how to curse," There was terrible Terry McGovern, "Ah, there was a street fighting harp for you, a real fighting turkey with dynamite in each mitt and a fighting heart that only an Irishman could own." Young Corbett was born, "with a horseshoe in his hands and a four-leaf clover in his hair…"

 

And so on; as impressive as any list of heroes in the sagas. Far from the flowing of the River Shannon, and the spectacle of the most beautiful lakes and the birthplace or the greatest tenor, the exile finds identity and inspiration in the demigods of the ring. The man who wrote about Old Man O'Brien and his listeners was to be very much aware of a condition of exile twice over: from the shadow and myth of the old country, a painful patriotism made more intense by what three thousand miles of salt water could do to the imagination; and also, because of the rigid religious, social and cultural values it imposed, from his own ethnic group in the New World, savagely and blindly hostile to other ethnic groups also fighting their way upwards. By comparison the Joycean exile in gallant Paris was an elegant business.

 

Old Man O'Brien's paean for the pugilists ends like this: "... most of them were real Irish lads who'd bless themselves before they fought. They weren't fake Irish like most of the present day dagoes and wops and sheenies who took Hibernian names . . . Baseball's the only clean game we got left. The Jews killed all the other games. The Kikes dirty up everything. I say the kikes ain't square. There never was a white Jew, or a Jew that wasn't yellow. And there'll never be one. Why, they even killed their own God ..."

 

That, you might say, is a journey by a rutted backway to the realm of the golden bough. It is not so much the hatred of Old Man O'Brien, and others, for Kikes and Shines, and others, all tossed together into the melting-pot of the City, not the Cave, of the Winds, that staggers the reader. It is the cold, implacable eye with which Farrell looks at his own people. It is doubtful if any Irish writer, living here, could, looking at the Irish, equal it; and that's saying something.

The attitude of that Irish-Chicagoan community towards the Shines is so intense as almost to be poetic: and the irony is rending. The good priest works hard to build up a parish and a splendid church. Then the realtor Kikes buy property and sell to the Shines, and the, "decent people", move out, the parish disappears and, horror of horrors, the Shines are even seen attending Mass. In a moment of delicate pathos Studs Lonigan sees a black boy kicking a stone or something along the sidewalk just as he had done as a boy, and comes to no conclusion at all about the matter. Or, very subtly, his creator doesn't allow him to come to any conclusion.

 

Here on this comparatively isolated island we knew, and know, little about such conflicts: although God and St. Patrick know that we always manage to find matter for aggravation. The bloody English, of course, worse than all the Kikes and Shines and Hunkies and Polacks that were ever heard of. What we'd have done without them, heaven only knows: even if it is on record that we did pretty well in the aggravation business long before the Normans crossed the narrow seas the present, and most welcome, US ambassador, William V. Shannon, wrote recently of James T. Farrell: "Farrell would be a significant figure in our (American) literature if for no other reason because he is our first great ethnic writer. He was a precursor of many black and Jewish writers as well as many later writers from the Irish and other European immigrant communities who have described the ordeal of trying to break away from the ethnic past and to locate themselves in the more challenging, heterogeneous, cosmopolitan life of modern America."

 

That was in the preface to a collection of essays, by various hands, on Irish-American fiction, edited in the US by Professors Daniel J. Casey and Robert E. Rhodes. It contains a most interesting consideration, by Professor Barry O'Connell, of some of Farrell's short stories.

 

He wrote an enormous amount but after the great success of the Studs Lonigan novels he held on only to a small, discriminating and long-remembering public. The television series and the big paperback may hopefully set a lot of people reading or rereading him. If, that is, well-viewed people read.

 

The Studs Lonigan novels I read a long time ago and, since then, having lived for a while in the States, I have found the rereading an excitement. Although a friend of mine, a New Yorker, Irish-American, told me he couldn't face up to it. As with George Moore and, The Scarlet Letter, he found the subject too painful.

 

Farrell was a plain spoken man. Dan Casey tells me he had him to lecture in his college of the University of New York State and when a guileless listener asked a question about Naturalism Farrell said bluntly that he'd never heard of it. He quoted with approval, and rightly, Frank Norris: "A literature that cannot be vulgarised is no literature at all and will perish." In the same page he quotes most relevantly from Plato and John Dewey.

 

He was humorous and good company and he did allow Studs Lonigan one good hotel (if not the Shelbourne) in his brief, frustrated life. Studs escorts his dream-girl Lucy to a ball: "Entering the hotel Studs tried to appear calm and natural, as if he belonged in places like this, and was the kind of a guy who could burst right into any kind of a joint, no matter how swell it was ... They passed across a pillared lobby that possessed an indefinable atmosphere of lacy ornateness. Studs felt that everybody was looking at him, ready to laugh if he pulled a bonner.... He walked by an old man lounging in a chair, half asleep ... He threw back his shoulders. He thought of himself as youth, and hoped the old man saw him and thought so too. He spotted several loudly-dressed Jews and they seemed to be looking at Lucy. She was worth looking at, and they should be envying him, but let them crack wise or dirty!"

 

Nothing is to come of his dream of Lucy: and Studs dying sadly at thirty takes with him into eternity the adolescence of James T. Farrell. But in the Horseshoe Bar I can still raise a glass and wait for Studs, most timorously in spite of that inner bluster, and Lucy to enter into the place where, according to his creator, Studs always wanted to get drunk.