An Honest Writer: The Life and Times of James T. Farrell [Hardcover]

Robert Landers (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 2004

James T. Farrell vaulted into the American literary firmament during the 1930s, becoming one of its brightest lights. "Studs Lonigan," his trilogy about a young Irish "tough" from Chicago's South Side, became a literary sensation and was acclaimed as a modern classic. Farrell went on to write some other excellent novels, and kept on writing for four more decades. But his courageous stance against Stalinism took a toll on his literary reputation, and later, as the naturalism he employed in his best fiction slipped out of vogue, his work fell into neglect and his star dimmed. Even "Studs Lonigan" came in recent decades to be little read. "An Honest Writer" recreates Farrells life and times and restores this important writer to his rightful place in the forefront of American literature. Robert Landers begins this landmark biography with Farrell's great subject: the vibrant Chicago of his birth and boyhood, the struggling Irish-Americans and others on the city's South Side, and his own family, whose eccentric members inspired some of the most memorable figures in his fiction. If the theme of Farrell's contemporary, Thomas Wolfe, was that "you can't go home again," the theme of his own work was that you never really leave. In Farrell's half-century as a writer, Chicago would remain as much a mythic landscape for him, a place standing for the whole of the American experience, as Yoknapatawpha County was for William Faulkner. In his chronicle of Farrell's effort to escape the heavy gravity of his youth and begin his audacious assault on the wider world, Landers gives us the archetypal journey of a young man discovering America at a time when the country was in the process of finding itself amid the crisis of the Great Depression. In his description of Farrell's search for love and sexual fulfillment, his relationships with friends and enemies such as Theodore Dreiser, Edmund Wilson and Nelson Algren, and his long quarrel with would-be censors who wanted to deny the harsh social realities portrayed in his works, Landers has given us a portrait not only of a man and a writer but of literary America in the middle decades of the 20th century. Drawing on the voluminous private papers that Farrell left behind upon his death in 1979, as well as on his own independent research and interviews, Landers opens a time capsule that reveals the connection between literature and politics from the 1930s onward. Initially drawn to the Communist Party when he left Chicago, Farrell was propelled by a radical vision in his early years as a writer and became deeply involved in the doctrinal disputes of the day. Yet he was ultimately a maverick who would not bow to any party discipline, and he awakened long before Hemingway, Malcolm Cowley and others to the horrors of Soviet totalitarianism. He freed himself from Marxist illusions for good at the onset of the Cold War, joining Sidney Hook, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and other leading anti-Communist liberals in the Congress for Cultural Freedom. With a deep sympathy for Farrell and an informed reading of the larger context in which he lived and worked, Robert Landers has produced a sparkling history of an era and a compelling portrait of one of its major figures. This authoritative biography arrives right on time for the James T. Farrell centenary in 2004.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Once regarded as a great chronicler of American urban life, James T. Farrell (19041979) wrote dozens of novels, most of which-except for the Studs Lonigan trilogy-are all but forgotten today. Wilson Quarterly senior editor Landers paints Farrell as an eccentric narcissist who held deep political convictions and an abiding faith in his own power to change the world. Farrell's fiction portrayed lower-middle-class Irish life on Chicago's South Side with an autobiographical naturalism that alienated him from childhood friends and attracted the attention of moralizing censors. In tandem with his "honest" writing, Farrell became deeply involved with communism and socialism, but "he awakened early to the horrors of Stalinism," and Landers recounts Farrell's in-fighting with fellow party members in detail. One wishes Landers spent as much ink on Farrell's personal life. Abandoned by his parents at an early age, he later struggled with failed romantic relationships, drug and alcohol abuse and years of poverty and creative uncertainty. Landers suggests, in the book's prologue, that Farrell's early abandonment was formative, though he does little later on to explore its continued significance. In the end, the ambitious, childlike Farrell is something of a tragic figure: Landers reveals that many of his peers, including Mary McCarthy and his secretary, Luna Wolf, thought him a hard-working compulsive who, for all his drive, lacked the stylistic genius to be a truly immortal author.
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From Booklist

James T. Farrell was acclaimed and lambasted for the "brutal realism" of his fictionalization of early-twentieth-century Chicago's working-class, Irish-Catholic South Side in his best-known books, the trilogy Studs Lonigan and the O'Neill-O'Flaherty series. Revered and resented for his honesty and fervor; avidly read and ranked beside Dreiser, Dos Passos, and Hemingway; and championed by Edmund Wilson and Richard Wright, Farrell was nonetheless soon forgotten, his gutsy, groundbreaking novels reduced to mere footnotes in the annals of literary history. Thankfully, Landers, of the Wilson Quarterly, now restores Farrell to his rightful place in American letters a century after his birth in this seminal and clarifying biography. By bringing Farrell's rough Chicago boyhood into crisp focus, Landers illuminates the primary source for his gritty fiction and the impetus for his becoming a boldly independent yet integral member of the radical Left. Landers convincingly argues that what Farrell, compulsively prolific and uneven, lacked in stylistic panache he made up for with keen observations and intensity, making him a literary force to be reckoned with, and treasured. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 546 pages
• Publisher: Encounter Books (March 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1893554953
• ISBN-13: 978-1893554955
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,974,149 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Brilliant Biography of a Once-Forgotten Writer, April 21, 2004

By 

Tom Moran (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: An Honest Writer: The Life and Times of James T. Farrell (Hardcover)

Robert K. Landers's "An Honest Writer: The Life and Times of James T. Farrell" tells the life story of a nearly-forgotten author who seems to be making a comeback at the moment. Whether he should or not is a matter of debate, but regardless of what you think of Farrell's work, his life certainly makes for an engrossing read.

Farrell was a kid of the Chicago streets, and much like another writer of Irish descent, James Joyce, he was never able to transcend his roots. Just as Joyce couldn't write about anything but the Dublin of his childhood, so Farrell was never able to successfully write about anything but the Chicago of his youth. Farrell hit it big in the "low dishonest decade" of the 1930s with the "Studs Lonigan" trilogy (recently reissued by both Penguin and the Library of America) and followed it up with a series of five novels about his autobiographical protagonist Danny O'Neill. But although he tried in later years to write more ambitious fiction, his past had its hooks in him and wouldn't let him go. His later work got more and more feeble, to the point where Farrell himself admitted that a lot of critics wished he had conveniently expired after finishing the third of the Studs Lonigan novels, "Judgment Day," at the age of thirty.

Landers does a wonderful job in tracing Farrell's development through the streets of Chicago to the murky political waters of 1930s left-wing politics, to a personal life that was as turbulent as any writer's, and arguably a lot less fortunate (although he caught a break towards the end of his life). It's clear that, between the drinking and the womanizing and the amphetamine-popping, Farrell was no prince to live with, but Landers endows him with a certain nobility as he keeps plugging along, writing book after book, until he's finally done in - as so many people of his generation, from W.H. Auden to Judy Garland, would be - by an addiction to pills.

It's not a pretty life, certainly, but Landers describes it amazingly well, and makes you interested enough to track down some of Farrell's books to see if his early reputation as a gritty chronicler of urban realism might be worth salvaging. I doubt that anyone will make the case for James T. Farrell better than Landers does, and his book should be investigated by anyone who cares about American fiction.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A carefully written life, but not lit crit, November 20, 2004

By 

John L Murphy "Fionnchú" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: An Honest Writer: The Life and Times of James T. Farrell (Hardcover)

Among leftist writers once lionised in America, James T. Farrell suffered (along with his slightly older counterpart John Dos Passos) one of the most precipitous declines. Imagine: having published his Studs Lonigan trilogy before the age of 30, he was not even 50 when he was assumed dead-at least on a plaque put up to honour past literati who had resided at New York's bohemian accommodation, The Hotel Chelsea. When I read his trilogy, considered the quintessential Irish American expression in print, it had just been reissued along with a 1979 TV version. I never saw the adaptation, but the evocation of documentary detail combined with sociological re-creation appealed to me much as some science-fiction has. That is, clumsily but engrossingly told. For Farrell, like authors of other genre fiction, conveyed the force of ideas and scenes rather than the polish of style and craft. The energy of his vocation propelled him past the fifty-book mark by his death, the same year that I read him and that the TV series appeared.

Self-absorbed, self-pitying, and self-righteous, these traits kept Farrell a type himself. Robert K. Landers offers a comprehensive biography drawing on not so much Farrell's fiction as his character.

Farrell here has received the attention of a conscientious and skeptical biographer, who keeps his distance a bit from both his subject's increasing grandiosity and his opponents' ideological ferocity. The depiction of his marriages, his affairs, and his anti-Stalinist skirmishes all emerge clearly and without melodrama. Landers, in a massive undertaking, only has three typos throughout, a rarity in these days even among serious books. And, by the way, it's amazing how poor a speller the unedited F. was, judging from his own correspondence here.

Farrell, asleep under the influence with a lit cigarette, incinerated much of his own archives, so the effort Landers makes to reconstruct the life and times of F. is considerable. Yet, you learn little of his actual work, even of Studs. Many admirers are quoted in these pages, but you wonder what the fuss is about, distant as Landers stands from his best work. Not to mention, on the other hand, lots more of his substandard productions. But, as is clear here, he lived long enough to write more slovenly work than stellar prose, unfortunately.

Understandably, some of his later novels gain no more than a single sentence of mention! This approach discourages newcomers from seeking out his lesser-known works, but apparently, Landers implies from the lack of coverage given the vast majority of his published product, they aren't worth the bother.

For decades, driven to keep churning out sub-standard contributions in order to support himself and satisfy his compulsion to create, Farrell poured out much of his waking time-aided by amphetamine addiction-into manic bursts of immersion, He could conjure up, as he had in Studs Lonigan's Southside Chicago's Washington Park neighbourhood, a wealth of precisely recalled descriptions, exactly rendered conversations, and characters drawn from life-his life, and his family. This did not endear him to all of his childhood and adolescent chums, not to mention his relatives, who found themselves not caricatured but recorded in his fiction, with only their names changed. But, protecting no innocents.

A dropout from the eminent University of Chicago, Farrell's studiously amateur but doggedly pursued course of largely autodidactic education led him early to reject the Church and embrace atheism. But, perhaps like Joyce in his creative vision if not his intellectual rigour, he could never truly leave Rome in favour of more rational or chilly cultural climes. As Joyce limned Dublin, so Farrell Chicago. Despite living in New York City most of his life, his best work emerged from his early encounters on the Southside.

And, like a musician playing the oldies circuit, audiences never wanted to hear his new album, his claims that the art he'd just done was his best effort yet. He knew he had made it once, and had to keep that bittersweet realisation for the next forty-five years.

But, in his defiance of the easy way out, in his view of function as a method by which the struggles of an Irish American slum family could be demonstrated, and by his forthright adherence to a cause called by many idealistic but by him somehow achievable, Farrell leaves a legacy better found, as Landers shows, in his refusal to put his characters into either revolutionary romanticism or socialist realism. As early as his first and best work, Farrell promised that he would never toe the party line. When writers were expected to kow-tow to how Lenin ordered art to be manufactured, Farrell broke the mold and hand-crafted his own awkward but endearing figures. When artists were threatened to hammer heroic figures out of proleterian clay, Farrell cleared a path for those for whom truth could never surrender to an ideology. For this, Farrell's Studs and Landers' Farrell deserve credit.

P.S. Studs Lonigan has been reissued by the Library of America.

(Edited from an on-line essay in the Blanket, "Unpopular Front : James T. Farrell then, Margaret Hassan now."

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Landers to the Rescue, November 1, 2004

By 

Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: An Honest Writer: The Life and Times of James T. Farrell (Hardcover)

Farrell is a remarkably underrated author, and here come Robert K. Landers of the Wilson Quarterly to the rescue. He doesn't think much of many of Farrell's novels, or so it seems, but he thinks that the best of the bunch are among the masterworks of American literature. Unfortunately, his critical skills aren't flexed enough in these pages, and so I wound up severely unimpressed with Farrell as a writer, though as a personality, bon vivant, speed addict, lover and Communist he had few if any peers. Landers is especialy strong at telling Farrell's story through the eyes of the three prominent women in his life. Perhaps the most intriguing of these strong women was Farrell's first wife, Betty, with whom he went to Paris as a very young man and figures in this life as sort of the enduring blazon that "Hadley" was for Hemingway. Sifting through the information gingerly, for I take it that she was still alive when he was writing this book, and still very insightful even though quote old, Farrell paints her as a liar or anyhow an exaggerator who piquantly enough crossed the color line before such things were done, and paid the price when her affair was publicized in Jet magazine or Ebony. Farrell's second wife, the talented actress Hortense Alden, is also a fascinating woman. What I thought was odd is the way that at one point, when she is introduced, Farrell says that she worked with the Lesbian actress Nazimova and "may have been" sexually involved with her. At a later date, after she married Farrell, Landers says they went to visit Nazimova, "Hortense's former lover," with no conditional mentioned this time. Copy editing? Or is it a sign of something more slipshod? The third woman, Cleo, gets nothing but praise, even though he wrote nothing interesting when he was with her, but Landers credits Farrell with prolonging his life and making him happy when he was with her and, according to them both, she didn't even realize he had become addicted to dexedrine. I wish there had been more in the book about Celo's editorship at AMERICAN GIRL magazine, one of the most influential and in retrospect interesting house organs of the period. He's good about Trotskyism, and explaining who was in and who was out at the PARTISAN REVIEW, but he elides over AMERICAN GIRL as though it were nothing. I suspect that, thorough as he is, he didn't read many issues of AG, too bad.

All in all, AN HONEST WRITER is a fascinating read that you won't be able to put down until the whole sad story is done. And the next book you will pick up will be the STUDS LONIGAN trilogy!