118
PARTISAN REVIEW
TRILOGY IN PROGRESS
NO STAR IS LOST.
By
]ames T. Farrell. Vanguard.
$3.00.
Some years ago I met Jim Farrell at a cocktail party.
It
was one
of those literary parties where writers strut their stuff, hangers-on
wallow in an ecstasy of self-identifi(:ation and booze, and a little
business is done on the sidelines. Farrell was all aglow with ideas,
drink and his usual belligerency. He got into many arguments. There
was one argument in particular, with a writer whose meretricious
novel had been ballyhooed into a masterpiece by the publisher and
a critics' claque-both the writer and the novel are now forgotten
The argument got hotte> and hotter, until Farrell finally enderl. it
with the words:
"You're a phony!"
In fact, Farrell might have been speaking of many writers of the
20's. They were overwhelmed by the depression of the 1930's, but
their pretences survived, in new forms, in the "proletarian" novelists
who set ·out to "revolutionize" literature. Novelists who knew nothing
of workers writing about the
wor~ers.
Novelists who forced life and
literature into arbitrary patterns del::orated with cliches. Novelists who
magnified their own little lives and ambitions with the mighty upward
movement of the working class-a typical "Jew boy makes good:'
story was refurbished into a proletarian epic!
Proletarian criticism was even worse than proletarian literature.
Never was literature and life, history and theory, tortured so sys–
tematically and brutally to justify the most amazingly unrear concep–
tions. James Farrell escaped all that, despite the pressure upon him to
submit to a phony proletarianism in literature. He was too honest and
too much the artist to submit. He engaged in polemics, indulged
in
sharp criticisms, was forced to develop and formulate his own critical
conceptions, clarifying the function of literature in general and its
relation to social revolt in particular. But, above all, Farrell concen–
trated on writing about the life he knew, creating the epic of
Studs Lonigan-an achievement without any parallel in American
literature.
It has been said of the Studs Lonigan series that its realism
is
static. Perhaps, but it is a realism that fits the milieu and its people.
They do not revolt, these people, they do not try consciously to react
upon and change their environment. But
Studs Lonigan
is a finer
picture than any other I know of that peculiar "revolt" which refuses
to accept conditions passively and yet knows nothing of the creative
thing to do about it. Most people accept submissively their environ–
ment and the life it imposes upon them. Others become conscious
rebels. Still others, because of limitations of character, time and place,
revolt in a manner that simply destroys them. They are driven to the
