The Dunne Family.
by James T. Farrell.
Doubleday. 326 pp. $8.95.
A landmark in American literature has just been achieved with the publication of James T. Farrell’s fiftieth book, The Dunne Family. Farrell is known as one of the major Chicago novelists, a naturalist, a modern classic. Yet in many people’s minds, he has been locked into a dead-issue decade; his work is thought to be synonymous with the reductive struggles and frustrated ideals of the 30’s. The irony is that during the 30’s Farrell was not only popular and recognized, with his fiction praised in the leading journals, but a member of the avant-garde, and already looked upon with suspicion by the dogmatists of proletarian literature. In his critical writings during the “Red Decade” he considered writers not then in fashion, such as Joyce and Ibsen, and confronted issues, like the social functions of literature, with an independent spirit. Again and again he declared that literature lay beyond the dictates of any political program, however righteous.
The two series he is best known for, the Studs Lonigan trilogy and the Danny O’Neill pentalogy, books which prompted H. L. Mencken to acclaim Farrell in 1947 as “the best American novelist,” are, in a way, works still in progress. His later books merely represent more recent installments in his huge comédie humaine of making it or going under in the many strata of the American middle class.
Farrell’s predilection is for assessing the flat appearance of his characters as clues to their essential natures. The fact that he is less interested in their existential possibilities has separated him from the dark ironists of contemporary fiction, writers like Burroughs, Barthelme, Heller, and Pynchon. The current taste is for the novel as an exercise of wit that takes place on the edge of human experience, not necessarily congruent with “acceptable” reality, whereas Farrell’s fiction rests on a belief that objective truth regarding the social as well as the psychological state of man is available and can be rendered in art. Given contemporary preferences, there is not much tolerance today for Farrell’s serious chronicle of Middle America as it feels at the center, a region of the spirit as well as of time and place.
Though they are called naturalistic, Farrell’s books do not present characters who are predetermined animals helplessly at sea among forces they cannot understand. Rather, these characters develop within a framework which encourages a study of their motivations. Farrell’s underlying Marxism is another factor here, one which blocks the pessimism endemic to naturalistic fiction.
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In the more recent books, the Danny O’Neill role as author’s persona has been taken over by Eddie Ryan. Eddie says what Farrell has always believed in, that “his future depended solely on himself.” The artist-hero hates moral or intellectual weakness and is a warrior in a moral battle. When Eddie chooses, at a pivotal moment, to go to the library instead of going home, he regards this first as simply a “symbolic gesture,” but later calls the decision a “purely personal moral assertion.” And in the new book a friend notes that he was “his own influence on himself”—a self-created creation—a model of freedom for the others who might seem tethered to economic and social conditions. In this light, even Studs Lonigan may be seen to have shaped his own unhappy life.
The aesthetic pleasures of Farrell’s work and its ultimate achievement have specifically to do with the way he portrays characters who appear and reappear within the complex structure of his novels. His artistry lies in the total absence of a straining after effect; all the details, the empty talk, the inflated attitudes are attended to and selected with a sensitivity that knows the truth of “the middle” is a flat truth and one that must be suffered over a long time in order to sink in. Like Faulkner’s saga of Yoknapatawpha, the work demands of the reader that he lose himself in it or else fall out of touch with its geographical and moral life. Entry into Farrell’s world requires the same kind of suspension of disbelief we normally connect with less direct and less realistic fiction or poetry. To enter this somewhat unattractive world imaginatively is to expend more than reading time. By calling it up for our notice, Farrell demonstrates one of the moral functions of literature, its ability to make us care more than we thought we could for people who seem so far removed from ourselves, whose world seems such a rebuke to our own.
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In The Dunne Family Farrell shows again how variously he can generate sympathy without condescension for the stark, ordinary, sentimental life that is his subject. Grace Dunne, mother of five, grandmother of young Eddie Ryan and his brothers and sisters, is the focus of all attention in the family. Despite her fragility and old age, she is a lively, dominating presence in an otherwise moribund household in Depression-era Chicago. Her two middle-aged sons, Larry and Dick, like FDR’s “forgotten men,” are out of work and depressed during much of the book’s action. They and Grace’s spinster daughter all feel “cheated by life.” Their mother’s death midway through the novel serves to unite these three, who are isolated in their separate miseries, for it marks the emotional correlative of their own existence: in many respects they literally do lead “buried lives.” Dick Dunne goes to Mass shortly after the funeral and finally has the realization, which feels almost like a vision to him, that his life is “sorely troubled” and has always been so.
Living barely above the poverty line, each of the three Dunne children gains some satisfaction from fantasy, “an ingrown life in a cluttered one-room apartment.” These pipe dreamers are artful dodgers, rationalizers pressed by the need to invent masks and keep up images. The three are obsessed with upward mobility and the need to get free, but the passion of their obsession is flattened out in Farrell’s language, which relies on cliché to bring home the pretext and self-deception necessary for even the modest success they do achieve. For instance, Larry is described as “on his way up in the shoe game.” He is also a believer in the firm handshake and the power of positive thinking (in this he is a forerunner of Middle America’s current infatuation with EST, TA, TM, etc.):
Larry and Len both believed in seeing the bright side of things. They both believed in always giving the other fellow a boost, never a knock.
“I always say this, Larry, if it’s bad, the other fellow won’t be glad to hear it.”
“That hits the nail square on the head, Len. After all, who enjoys listenin’ to a crepehanger? God gives us a bright sunny morning like this for us to think bright sunny thoughts for ourselves and for our fellow men.”
Farrell does not satirize this. There is no disdain, simply evocation. The Dunne family is a symphony of revealing clichés that become developed in Farrell’s hands into full-blown metaphors of life in the middle:
At sixty-one, Dick Dunne was still waiting for his ship to come in. The waters were rough and there was no abatement from the battering of the waves, but he still believed in the safe return of his ship with a cargo of rewards for him.
As these worn phrases float over the plot, they illuminate the condition of stasis in which the life of Farrell’s characters is ineffectually lived. In a flashback Larry is observed thinking about whether or not to marry. “He sat and smoked a cigarette—this is a serious step. Look before you leap.” Then Farrell flatly announces, “It was his intention to marry Edna Earnsworth.” Larry does marry Edna, but his seriousness of intention is polluted by fear and ignorance, and when she dies he never acknowledges or even is aware of his responsibility for her death.
As Farrell’s persona, Eddie Ryan, who is a writer himself, functions on the periphery of the plot. During Grace Dunne’s passing and much of the family’s troubles he is off in New York and Paris, becoming famous for his books which are not yet about the Dunne family. He is planning, however, to chronicle them after he has achieved some emotional distance. Eddie is in the story mainly to bring light and energy into the drab existence of the family. His letters are the only comfort to Grandma Dunne. When his first book arrives (Studs Lonigan, here called Jud Jennings), the Dunne household is proud and anxious at the same time.
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Eddie and the purpose he serves are introduced early in the book when Jenny Dunne, musing over her hard and lonely existence, comes around to the terrible recognition that her life is meaningless and matters very little to anyone. “Who should care?” she asks.
To Edward Arthur Ryan, it did matter. Edward Arthur Ryan was a young man determined to make it matter to as many people in the world as he could reach. . . . It was not a case of Edward Arthur Ryan merely making the life of his Aunt Jenny matter; he would make as many lives as he could matter.
While this may sound calculating in the mouth of a young writer, it has always been Farrell’s idea as a novelist to offer a perspective that encourages and rewards compassion in the midst of all the squabbles and battering, all the grief, misery, and hatred which characterize life in his world. This perspective informs The Dunne Family no less than its forty-nine predecessors, and for serving it faithfully Farrell richly deserves the measure of honor that has been coming to him in recent days.
