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PARTISAN REVIEW
mind that is full of noise , not much else . Today the noisy-minded
can attract attention, I suppose , for a while. You see, the trouble
with these noisy-minded people
IS
that they have to be sub–
stituted for. You have to get other noisemakers. That's why I
think there is a withdrawal of many academic people from the
popular scene, because every day there has to be a new sensation,
and the academics want something more stable . Their purpose is
not
all
careerist; part of it is a serious attempt to achieve some
stable sense of literature and of values . There are some men-I
don't think they're as great or important as they're made out to
be, but they're civilized, serious men-like Lionel Trilling, who
attempt to retain a sense of values. That' s one aspect of the
situation in academia. It's a form of resistance-it might not be
the best form-but it is a form , and in many cases a serious one .
Interviewer:
Your mention of values reminds me of the point often
brought up about the Lonigan trilogy, that you pick Catholic
characters and that this gives a context, a sense of values, in
which your characters live and move. Did you pick that
deliberately?
Farrell:
You see, the point was that I grew up in Catholic neighbor–
hoods and went to parochial schools , and the character I set on
was a Catholic . Of course it was picked deliberately, but it was a
natural thing also . I knew the Catholic boys best. Not all my
characters are Catholics, but many of them are. As a matter of
fact , many people in America think it' s detrimental if you've been
raised a Catholic so far as writing is concerned. But to the
contrary, it can be a great value and help. You have an ordered
universe full of meanings, symbolic meanings, to set yourself for
or against, so there is an interrelationship of meanings and
problems. As there is development, there are problems. We'll
never be free of problems ; the more we develop, the more
problems we'll have . In passing, what many in this country fail to
distinguish is the difference between a genuine crisis and a
problem. In writing, when there are many problems, there is
more to write about.
Interviewer:
By way of a final question, let me ask something in
regard to the sense of values and a writer's task. You wrote in
your essay on Theodore Dreiser that he was looking for a theory
of existence. You now have fifty books in print, part of a large but
connected corpus, as though it were one large look at life. Should
