The New York Intellectuals (10th Anniversary Edition)

by Alan M Wald

  A 1954 essay in the New Leader called “Reflections at Fifty” gives some insight into the philosophical aspects of this change in views:

  When I first began to write I was full of indignation because of the sorrows of the world. I was angry because of cruelty, because of the exploitation of some men and women by others, because of the coldness with which some people manipulate others, because of dirt, ignorance, aggressiveness, and the other things which ruin and sadden human lives. . . . It is not possible at fifty to feel the indignation of one’s youth. . . . Indignation has turned to a stoical feeling. I have come to see that pain and agony are part of the way it is in life.56

  These sentiments are reminiscent of the ideas Ralph Waldo Emerson expressed in his essays “Compensation” and “Experience”; and it was also Emerson, the forerunner of such pragmatists as C. S. Peirce and William James, whom Farrell cited in a 1978 statement announcing his decision to join Social Democrats USA, the right wing of the American Social Democracy.57 Although officially advocating socialism, the politics of this organization are hard to distinguish from those of traditional mainstream Democrats and Republicans.

  This new mood, embryonic in Farrell’s writings since the Bernard Carr trilogy was under way in the mid-1940s, grew steadily during a transition in his literary activities involving several false starts that lasted until October 1958. At that time he formally inaugurated his fourth and final series of books, “A Universe of Time.” In content this series of a dozen published books is largely a ratification and extension of his lifelong plan “to create out of the life that I have seen, known, experienced, heard about, and imagined, a panoramic story of our days and years, a story which would continue through as many books as I would be able to write.”58 Many of the important characters in “A Universe of Time” had already appeared in earlier books, but now they were given new names—Danny O’Neill is called Edward Arthur Ryan, the O’Neills are the Ryans, and the O’Flahertys are called the Dunnes. Another difference is that the new series has a looser organizational conception and includes novels, a prose poem, and short stories that range over a broader, although ultimately interlinked, group of people, time periods, and locales.

  A more decisive change, however, is that Farrell’s new stoic philosophy of the 1950s is dominant in “A Universe of Time,” manifested through the autumnal and mellow tone that has displaced the uncompromising anger of Farrell’s earlier books. In the 1940s Farrell wrote that his fiction helped to forge a perspective necessary for a socialist future because his novels alerted readers to the “ideal of attaining the full stature of humanity.”59 In the 1950s he described “A Universe of Time” as “a relativistic panorama of our times” concerned with “man’s creativity and his courageous acceptance of impermanence.”60 This new sense of acceptance is facilitated by the settings of most of this last group of books. The situations depicted are often insular and repressed in atmosphere. And the unifying character emerging from this, Eddie Ryan, is largely preoccupied with his own personal struggles between his emotional drives and the need for artistic self-discipline.

  Five weeks before his death on 22 August 1979 Farrell completed a novel about a left-wing New York Jewish intellectual, Sam Holman, published posthumously in 1983. For those familiar with the inside history of New York radicalism in the 1930s, there was no doubt that the main character is based on the life of Herbert Solow, the brilliant organizer of the Dewey Commission of Inquiry, who eventually became one of the editors of Fortune. Moreover, in addition to Holman many other characters in the novel can be identified with New York leftists of the era, often by simply reversing the initial letters of their first and last names: Carl Winston is Whittaker Chambers; Saul Miklas is Meyer Schapiro; Tommy Stock is Clifton Fadiman; Norman Rosen is Felix Morrow; Oliver Hirsch is Elliot Cohen; Leroy Margolis is Max Lerner; Henry Smart is Sidney Hook; Ernest Milan is Max Eastman; Rita Moeller is Elinor Rice; Nobel Green is George Novack; Josephine Lawrence is Diana Trilling; Tommy Lawrence is Lionel Trilling; Frances Dunsky is Tess Slesinger; Carl Leon is Lewis Corey; Frank Y. Weathers is William Z. Foster; Donald Jolley is John McDonald; Henry Abelman is Albert Halper; A. M. Jillet is A. J. Muste; Charles Cleary is James P. Cannon; Bertram Jackson is James Burnham; Willard Endicott is Edmund Wilson; Kate Fieldstone is Freda Kirchway; Oscar Lacey is Liston Oak; Tracey Norren is Norman Thomas; and Edward A. Ryan is James T. Farrell.

  Yet Farrell did not intend his portraits to be strictly biographical; they are constructed partly from memory, with considerable imaginative input. Holman, for example, receives a Ph.D. from Columbia University, which Solow never did. He also becomes involved in the Jewish-humanist publication Modern Torah while he is a radical, whereas Solow was assistant editor of the Menorah Journal years earlier and quit when he became an active Marxist. Eventually Holman joins the Communist Party, while Solow remained only an ally. In 1929 Holman, not yet a radical, travels abroad where he meets Henry Smart at the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow and Ernest Milan while visiting Trotsky on the Turkish island of Prinkipo. In fact, Solow’s trip to the Soviet Union was in 1932 when he was already pro-Communist and long after Hook had returned to the United States.

  The theme of Sam Holman is indirectly related to that of the original plan for the Bernard Carr trilogy: the descent of genuine talent into mediocrity. Holman is among the most brilliant and respected of a brilliant group of young intellectuals, and he typifies their political trajectory from a revolutionary opposition to capitalism to a reconciliation with the status quo. But from first to last his achievements turn out to be disproportionately less than his promise once seemed to indicate.

  Holman suffers a kind of rootlessness, an inability to locate the proper medium and vision through which to express his talents. Smart has his scholarly commitment to the field of philosophy and Miklas to art history, but Holman lives from day to day with little control over the direction of his life. This luftmensch quality is dramatized by a series of love affairs—including a first marriage that is little more than a long affair—that begin and end haphazardly. Reaching middle age, he stumbles into a second marriage as well as a comfortable job as a writer for Empire. In this more stable environment he is able to function productively for several decades but hardly at the level for which he once seemed destined.

  The method of the book might easily lead to a misunderstanding of its point of view. Farrell’s strategy in Sam Holman, as in most of his other works, is to use a minimum of authorial intrusion in order to depict the world through Holman’s eyes with only occasional digressions into the minds of others. Thus the harsh judgments—for example, about the more committed leftists Rosen and Green—are those of the cynical Holman, not necessarily Farrell. We are pointedly reminded of this toward the end of the book when Holman muses with equal skepticism about the literary achievements of the Farrell persona, the almost-forgotten novelist Edward A. Ryan. Thus the somewhat hollow and disconnected atmosphere in the novel, as well as the shallow perceptions about various characters, are calculated to reflect defects in Holman’s own emotional life.

  Sam Holman is a serious attempt to tell at least part of the “per sonal truth” of what it was like to be a radical intellectual in the 1930s, thus in a certain sense resembling Harvey Swados’s posthumous novel Celebration (1974). We are shown how men treat women; how personal and political ambitions are bound together; and how abstractions about social justice become substitutes for engagement in the real world. Yet the depiction of Holman would have been more convincing if we had also been given evidence of the quality of his intellect. Mary McCarthy’s “Portrait of the intellectual as a Yale Man” more fully and effectively creates a radical intellectual of the time. Farrell’s Holman, in contrast to her richly painted James Barnett, seems to have come from nowhere; the careful attention paid to the shaping forces of family and environment, so central to the vivification of Studs Lonigan and Danny O’Neill, are nearly absent. Not only do we know little of Holman’s background, but we do
not know much more about the reality of his presence other than that he sports a reddish-brown mustache and tends to be skeptical of the sincerity and intellect of almost every man he meets. The reasons for his astonishing sexual attractiveness to women are never explained. Moreover, the dialogue in Sam Holman suggests that Farrell found it difficult in his later years to vary the language and vocabulary of his characters within and among novels. This may be one of the reasons why some readers and critics fail to appreciate the true diversity of his oeuvre.

  Although there has been a steady revival of interest since 1975 in Farrell’s life and writing, his greatest impact was and probably will always be linked to his multifaceted role as a radical novelist and activist during the Great Depression and World War II years. An indication of renewed interest in him came at the time of the publication of his fiftieth book, The Dunne Family (1976). In celebration of this literary milestone, a “Salute to James T. Farrell” was held at the St. Regis Hotel in New York City. Norman Mailer, one of several prominent novelists who addressed the gathering, stated that Farrell’s works had modified the sensibility of many writers of his generation and that Farrell’s relentlessness in pursuing his literary goals in spite of all adversity should be a model for others to follow.61 A second indication of a minor Farrell revival came on 7, 14, and 21 March 1979, when the National Broadcasting Company presented Studs Lonigan as a television miniseries that was seen by millions of viewers. Shortly afterward he received the Emerson-Thoreau award from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

  But the brief spurt of interest in Farrell during the four years prior to his death will probably not alter his literary stature significantly. Three aspects of his work have been debated at length. While he was praised in the 1930s for his powers of observation and his bold use of American speech, he was accused early on of masquerading documentaries as novels and charged with being insufficiently selective in the experiences he depicted. In the 1940s some critics began to argue that he was a prisoner of the moribund school of naturalism; others claimed that he was a repetitious writer, clumsy, and devoid of grace and style.

  The issue of Farrell’s selectivity is a central one. Opinions range from that of Ann Douglas, who wrote in a eulogy that “Farrell’s work constitutes the last important experiment to date in American literature with what can be viewed as deliberately unedited material,” to that of Diana Trilling, who said that “the truth is that Farrell is a meticulous craftsman, choosing both incident and language with care and skill.”62 Trilling’s assessment is more accurate, but the corollary is that the care and skill of selection must be guided by a clear and compelling vision that establishes priorities in the relationships revealed. During the first phase of Farrell’s development, when he was animated by a Marxist anger at the manner in which class relations impeded human development, his vision was vividly sustained and focused on precise objectives. However, in the years leading up to “A Universe of Time,” Farrell’s anger dissipated into stoicism: a new vision had to be developed that made demands for which his technique was not always fully prepared.

  The claim that Farrell was a simple environmental determinist or a prisoner of the putatively dated school of naturalism has largely been discredited. Farrell himself criticized the limitations of the naturalist perspective as early as his 1936 A Note on Literary Criticism: at that time he linked naturalism to mechanical materialism and accused it of fostering an expansive rather than an intensive approach to art. In 1964 Edgar Branch, Farrell’s most reliable critic, published a convincing essay, “Freedom and Determinism in James T. Farrell’s Fiction.” Branch demonstrated that Farrell’s “functional conception of the self” in his fiction was one that exhibited “a full pattern of human conduct . . . that accommodates freedom.” Branch’s conclusion that Farrell is a “critical realist” seems apt.63

  Farrell’s greatest weakness as a writer was that he failed to develop either sufficient consciousness about or a sophisticated theory of the uses of language in writing fiction beyond admirable but rather simple notions that language must serve the end of accurately recreating character and environment. There is no doubt that his heavy reliance on personal experience made Farrell’s work appear redundant to many critics. In short, his prose failed to communicate to many readers the true diversity of the experiences he aspired to depict.

  A famous man by the time he was thirty, Farrell’s three decades from the mid-1940s to the mid-1970s witnessed a reversal of fortune; his survival as a writer became an ordeal. Hounded by censors in 1948 when Philadelphia police attempted to stop the sales of Studs Lonigan, sneered at by a herd of literary detractors, and harassed by publishers who did not find his books sufficiently marketable, he persisted in a curmudgeonly sort of rebellion and drifted into near obscurity. In the 1950s friends urged him to settle down to a teaching post, but he refused. Unwilling to let monetary considerations influence his writing and inhospitable to new cultural trends, he persisted in using his art idiosyncratically to tell the truth as he saw it. At one point he was evicted from his apartment for nonpayment of rent, and on another occasion financial desperation forced him to sell the movie rights to Studs Lonigan for a pittance. But he only became stronger in his belief that he must resist commercial forces. In 1961, at what was probably the nadir of his career, he publicly declared, “I began writing in my own way and I shall go on doing it. This is my first and last word on the subject.”64

  Future biographers will have to probe the psychological causes and artistic consequences of such single-minded determination, but Farrell himself justified his defiant pursuit of his own literary objectives in terms of social value. Quoting from Tolstoy’s What Is Art? (1897–98), he explained that the purpose of his writing technique is to “infect [the reader] with feeling” so as to awaken the reader’s mind to the social forces at work in shaping one’s life.65 “The most important thing that a person can do is teach,” wrote Farrell at the outset of an essay, “The Value of Literature in Modern Society.”66 Farrell’s ability to sustain a loyal readership in spite of decades of aggressive assault by critics suggests that his endeavor to transform his personal experiences into art resounded in the emotions and intellects of a significant audience.

  Part III. The Great Retreat

  Chapter 9. Apostates and True Believers

  Tell him, in manhood, he must still revere The dreams of early youth, nor ope the heart Of heaven’s all-tender flower to canker-worms

  Of boasted reason,— nor be led astray When, by the wisdom of the dust, he hears Enthusiasm, heavenly-born, blasphemed.

  —Schiller, Don Carlos1

  “RED FASCISM”

  The particular variant of post-World War II social thought, in which many of the political and cultural ideas of the New York intellectuals became essentially hegemonic, was correctly characterized by Robert Booth Fowler as that of “believing skeptics,” a selective kind of skepticism that is itself nothing less than ideology sui generis.2 Not only was the notion of the “end of ideology” an ideological stance in its own right, but the supraclass values of “realism” and “modulation” vaunted by Lionel Trilling and others were equally deceptive. Despite the use of euphemisms (such as Dwight Macdonald’s 1952 statement “I choose the West,” all the more remarkable for one so adept at exposing the sham rhetoric of others), the program and perspectives of most of the New York intellectuals during the postwar era embodied support for capitalism, albeit with a sprinkling of criticism to salve their consciences.3

  In 1967, Philip Rahv, who had suddenly become transformed back into a leftist, offered a trenchant critique of the role played by a sizable number of New York intellectuals in the American Committee for Cultural Freedom: “The people who accepted CIA subsidies without being clear in their minds as to what was involved are in many ways to be compared to the ‘fellow-travelers’ and ‘stooges’ of the 1930s, who supported Stalin’s reading of Marxism and his murderous policies even as they spoke of the Russia he despotically
ruled as a ‘workers’ paradise’ and as a ‘classless society.’ But in contrast to the ‘stooges’ of yesterday, the ‘stooges’ of today are paid cash on the line for their various declarations.”4 True enough, affiliation with the American Committee for Cultural Freedom and its vision of an imperfect but non-imperialist United States could bring free trips abroad, subsidies for magazines, and executive jobs. Its 1954 budget, for example, totaled over $170,000 in grants from the Heritage Foundation ($41,000), the Farfield Foundation ($10, 000), the Fleischmann Foundation ($40,000), and other institutions and individuals.5 All that was required for a slice of the pie was a self-imposed blind spot when it came to U.S. intervention in Iran, Guatemala, and elsewhere, as well as an ability to minimize the pernicious antiradical witch-hunt in the United States.

  Although distinct personal paths were followed, the rejection of an ideology explicitly based upon a Marxist analysis was eventually embraced by most of the New York intellectuals. It was scarcely coincidence that their shifts in perspective came to a head after World War II. Thus the transit of the New York intellectuals from revolutionary anti-Stalinism to a self-proclaimed “liberal anti-communism,” with their corresponding shift in political allegiance, must be considered in a sociohistorical context. What remained most consistent in their ideological outlook in the postwar era was their virulent hostility to Stalinism, which increasingly became redefined to mean Leninism and ultimately any form of revolutionary Marxism. They seized on the fact that Leninism and Stalinism had a sequential relationship and certain superficial similarities, conveniently forgetting their earlier belief that the former was in essence a negation of the latter.