by Alan M Wald
Chronologically, the pentalogy begins with The Face of Time, published last in 1953, which follows Danny’s emergence into consciousness at the very time his grandfather, Tom O’Flaherty, is dying. It concludes with Danny’s college years in My Days of Anger (1943), which emphasizes his renunciation of religion, his initial encounters with philosophy and modern literature, and his first eager steps as a writer. Of the five novels, only A World I Never Made achieved popular success, and this may have been partly due to a well-publicized trial in which Farrell was accused, and acquitted, of including obscenity in the novel. But the O’Neill-O’Flaherty series never attained the stature of the Studs Lonigan trilogy because it lacks the dramatic focus afforded by Studs Lonigan’s violent eruption into young manhood followed by ill health and death. What is superior about the O’Neill-O’Flaherty series is its relentless detailing of the generational conflicts among big-city Irish-American families whose members are depicted in all of their intermediate stages of acculturation and economic advancement. Moreover, the series enjoys a distinct position: it is perhaps the definitive examination of the social basis of the emergent consciousness of an artist in the process of rebelling against the shackles of his lower-middle-class cultural heritage in order to redefine his own personality and objectives in Marxist terms.
Critics harshly accused Farrell of lacking a sophisticated literary technique, but Farrell never made excessive claims about his writing style. He stated that he wrote primarily from his unconscious, achieving characterization by intensely identifying with each of his fictional creations as he imaginatively recreated a world seen through their eyes. Although he admired the consummate craftsmanship of Henry James and James Joyce, he endeavored to achieve a “clear path” to his unconscious. Part of what Farrell meant was that he relied on his own imaginative resources in attempting to create the “body image” of each of his main characters. The notion of the “body image”—meaning the total sense of oneself, including the visceral—was assimilated by Farrell at the outset of his career from the Freudian psychiatrist Paul Schilder. Farrell saw a correlation between the work of Schilder and the views of William James, George Herbert Mead, and John Dewey, which argued that human character is a social product.44 This approach to fiction required an intimate knowledge of the thoughts, emotions, and social circumstances of one’s characters; and this is part of the reason why the bulk, although not the entirety, of Farrell’s work centers around the experiences of his family and acquaintances in familiar Chicago and New York environments. Even in those works in which an autobiographical persona, usually Danny O’Neill or Eddie Ryan, is not the main character, he sometimes appears in a cameo role as if to facilitate the process of empathizing with the other characters.
The Bernard Carr trilogy—the name of the main character was changed from Bernard Clare to Bernard Carr after a libel suit was brought by a man named Bernard Clare—relies heavily on Farrell’s personal experiences as do his earlier series, but it was intended to depict the process of political and moral corruption of writers in the 1930s. As the published version of the trilogy suggests, Farrell in tended Carr to become a half-willing proponent of Stalinism and then fall victim to commercial corruption. But after eight years of writing, and with many false starts and a variety of projected conclusions, Farrell’s original intention never materialized; Carr’s future remains undetermined at the conclusion of the trilogy.
The reason that the original plan was aborted is bound up in the political crisis that overwhelmed Farrell during the late 1940s. In early drafts of the series, Danny O’Neill was to be introduced as a foil to Carr. O’Neill was to have appeared as a mature novelist of revolutionary Marxist but anti-Stalinist convictions. In a scene describing a radio debate between Carr and O’Neill that Farrell cut from the published version, O’Neill lambasted the self-serving and even reactionary political character of one of Carr’s novels: “All of the agonizing, all of the frothy talk about his [Carr’s] own sincerity, his own honesty, his discovery of what are called basic human values, is really a way for Mr. Carr to console himself, to console his hero, to permit his hero to accept the status quo and thereby to apologize for his hero’s failure to overcome anything.”45
The contrast between O’Neill and Carr was intended to expose Carr as an intellectual variant of Studs Lonigan—as someone incapable of an authentic rebellion against cultural conditioning and social pressures. Farrell decided to eliminate O’Neill from the final version of the book because he himself was beginning to lose confidence in revolutionary Marxist ideas. Instead, he closed the second volume of the trilogy on an ambiguous note. Then, at the close of the third volume he presented some tentative but optimistic suggestions for the future. The grounds for his cautious optimism were not so different from those obtained by Laskell at the end of The Middle of the Journey: Carr had first cast off the ideological blinders of the church, then rid himself of Stalinism; now he would be free to immerse himself in the experience of life.
This pragmatic theme is also indicated by an epigram from Heraclitus in the front of the book: “Into the same river you could not step twice, for other (and still other) waters are flowing.” Toward the end of the novel the theme is dramatized in a striking scene when Bernard contrasts the abstractness of his book-learning with the reality of his own son: “I talk about the downfall of civilization, about the rise of Socialism, about human culture from Peking Man and Pithecanthropus erectus to Mass Action [the Communist literary publication], and I don’t know a hell of a lot about a baby—my own baby, to be specific.”46 This change in focus took its toll on the quality and coherence of the trilogy. The change in the novel’s political perspective also did violence to another important particular: Carr’s choice, unlike that of Farrell and his contemporaries, is always between Communism and anti-Communism; anti-Stalinist Marxism never appears as an option.
Farrell’s political crisis was under way by 1944, at which time he began to follow the thinking of Albert Goldman and Felix Morrow, who led a tendency in the Socialist Workers Party. By 1948 Farrell had begun to issue crude anticommunist statements, establishing a political association with Sidney Hook that would last beyond the Cold War years. During the Cannon-Shachtman schism in 1939–40, Farrell at first had felt sympathy for Shachtman but then concluded “that there was validity in the slogan of defense of the USSR” even though he was somewhat uncertain about the Soviet Union’s social character. He enjoyed good personal relations with many members of the Socialist Workers Party, including Cannon, Novack, Goldman, and Morrow, and threw himself into the work of the Civil Rights Defense Committee, which he saw as an independent activity through which he could make a special contribution.47
Nevertheless, when Goldman and Morrow began to develop a series of criticisms of the SWP leadership just before and during their imprisonment after being convicted of violating the Smith Act, Farrell was sympathetic. Goldman himself was an attractive and impressive figure. Born Albert Verblen of working-class parents in Chicago in 1897, Goldman graduated from Medill High School and attended the University of Cincinnati while concurrently training to be a reform rabbi at Hebrew Union College.48 During the summer of 1919, while working in the Dakota wheat fields, he came into contact with militant itinerant farmworkers and later that year joined the IWW. In 1920 he joined the Communist Party. For several years he worked as a journeyman tailor in the cloth-cutting trade, but in June 1923 entered the Northwestern University Law School, graduating with highest honors in 1925. From 1926 to 1933 he was a prominent attorney for the Communists’ International Labor Defense. Following a visit to the Soviet Union in 1930 he began to be critical of the party and was finally expelled from it for Trotskyism in 1933.
Following his service as Trotsky’s attorney during the Dewey Commission of Inquiry hearings, Goldman worked as counsel for Teamsters Local 574 in Minneapolis, resuming the post he had previously held during the 1934 strikes. In 1939 he moved to New York City to work full-time for the SWP at $15 a
week. During the 1939–40 break with Shachtman, Goldman defended Cannon’s position, but his tone was characteristically less harsh. In his articles for the Trotskyist press, and in popular educational lectures, Goldman established a reputation for expressing himself modestly and for being genuinely responsive to his opponents’ arguments. In mid-1941 he was among the twenty-nine leaders and members of the SWP indicted in Minneapolis for allegedly violating the Smith Act; after a trial at which Goldman acted as defense counsel for those indicted, eighteen were convicted and Goldman received a sixteen-month sentence which he served at Sandstone Federal Prison in northern Minnesota.49
While in prison, Goldman and Morrow began to develop a series of increasingly harsh criticisms of the SWP leadership.50 Their supporters never amounted to more than a few dozen, but they included several important figures, such as Jean van Heijenoort, a former mathematics student at the Sorbonne who had been Trotsky’s chief assistant throughout much of his third exile and who served as secretary of the Fourth International, based in New York, during World War II. In addition, views analogous to Goldman and Morrow’s were endorsed by a large minority among the French Trotskyists led by Yvan Craipeau; a majority of the British Trotskyists led by Jock Haston and Ted Grant; and virtually all of the exiled German Trotskyists.
In a familiar pattern that had unfolded in previous faction fights, the Goldman-Morrow tendency began with a central argument that had a good deal of truth to it. Their criticisms of the party’s organizational practices, if correct, also seem justified. However, as the debate persisted and became more virulent, Goldman and Morrow began introducing a number of less tenable positions and taking desperate actions that undermined their claim as a loyal opposition. In the final stages of the factional struggle that they had begun in the name of defending true Trotskyism and Leninism against epigones, they rather quickly repudiated both and succumbed to the simplistic anticommunism they had fought for decades, which now dominated intellectual life in the United States.
Goldman and Morrow’s strongest argument challenged Trotsky’s somewhat catastrophic perspective that World War II would be followed by a wave of socialist revolutions in the major countries of western Europe, with Stalinism in the Soviet Union quickly eradicated either by an internal political revolution or an externally imposed capitalist restoration. Instead, Goldman and Morrow correctly foresaw that it would be necessary to struggle against an enlarged and politically enhanced Stalinist movement for decades. In contrast, Cannon and the majority of the SWP still adhered to Trotsky’s original prediction, one that would not be realized, and they would continue to support it for a number of years. Yet the question remains as to whether Goldman and Morrow’s predictions were actually based on a superior insight into the nature of the epoch; it is also possible that, in the process of losing their revolutionary convictions, they were merely projecting the existing, pessimistic situation of the mid-1940s into the future. Likewise, one can question whether the view of Cannon and his supporters simply entailed a dogmatic adherence to prewar predictions; those prewar predictions may have contained an important element of truth that Cannon should be credited for perceiving.
The course of postwar global history suggests that each position contained a mixture of subjective responses and insights into objective reality. Successful anticapitalist revolutions did occur, which undermined the stability of Western capitalism, but they occurred in China and Yugoslavia rather than in western Europe. Powerful working-class struggles did take place in several capitalist nations, as had been predicted, but for various reasons they did not result in an overturning of the social order. Cannon’s perspective had to undergo considerable changes to adjust to this new world reality, and a certain dogmatism may have delayed his recognition and theorization of the changed situation longer than necessary. Still, Cannon and his followers in the Socialist Workers Party emerged from this difficult conjuncture with a balance between their anti-Stalinism and anticapitalism. Goldman and Morrow, on the other hand, became totally disoriented and drifted steadily to the right, with Farrell following not too far behind.
In 1945–46, as the faction fight entered into its penultimate stage, Goldman and Morrow proposed that the Socialist Workers Party reunify with the Workers Party. The proposal itself was not at all implausible, and, in fact, Cannon himself (albeit skeptically) would endorse it a year and a half later at the urging of leaders of the Fourth International. After all, Trotsky had argued that the split in 1940 was unnecessary and that supporters of his views could live with the followers of Shachtman-Burnham even if they were in a minority. By the mid-1940s it was clear that the Workers Party had not, as the Socialist Workers Party predicted, succumbed to social patriotism during World War II; if anything, the Workers Party’s approach to the war was ultraleftist, although there were instances when such a position only prefaced a movement to the right. Goldman and Morrow, failing to win the Socialist Workers Party to a position favoring unity, began to openly collaborate with the Workers Party leadership, thereby jeopardizing their own membership in the Socialist Workers Party. Goldman, in fact, simply walked out of the Socialist Workers Party in May 1946 and joined the Workers Party. Soon Jean van Heijenoort was working with the Workers Party. Then Lou Jacobs, known as a longtime Socialist Workers Party leader under the name “Jack Weber,” and Sarah Jacobs, who had served as one of Trotsky’s secretaries under the name “Sarah Weber,” developed their own disagreements with the Socialist Workers Party and left to briefly collaborate with the Workers Party as well. Morrow was expelled from the Socialist Workers Party at its November 1946 convention on the grounds of engaging in unauthorized meetings with Shachtman, but by then he had become so discouraged that he never followed through on his commitment to join the Workers Party.
During the summer of 1945, Farrell had already begun associating more closely with the Workers Party. This turn was precipitated by an incident in which the Socialist Workers Party leaders refused to publish in the Socialist Workers Party journal, Fourth International, a letter by Farrell protesting what he believed to be the Socialist Workers Party’s unneccessarily factional attitude toward the WP. Cannon then rather bluntly answered it in an article published in the Socialist Workers Party’s Internal Bulletin.51 As a copious contributor to the Workers Party magazine, New International, Farrell still appeared to be an ardent champion of revolutionary Marxism. He even looked askance at young party intellectuals such as Irving Howe, who seemed to be adapting to trends in culture that Farrell thought were conservatizing because they disparaged realism and naturalism in literature.52 Yet in mid-1948 Farrell and Albert Goldman suddenly broke with the Workers Party and switched their allegiance to the Socialist Party. Only a few months earlier, Jean van Heijenoort had repudiated Marxism entirely.
In 1948 Farrell and Goldman jointly had taken exception to two positions of the Workers Party: they supported the Marshall Plan while the Workers Party opposed it; and they advocated endorsing Norman Thomas’s presidential campaign while the Workers Party took the position that a protest vote for the Socialist Workers Party, Socialist Labor Party, or Socialist Party all were acceptable. In March 1948 Farrell suggested to Goldman in a letter that it was utopian to insist that the working class of Europe should struggle simultaneously against the forces of Stalinism and American imperialism. The former represented pure evil while the latter was an acceptable ally:
The simple and blunt fact of the matter is that nothing stands in the way of the Stalinization of Europe but American power. The motives of the American capitalists in opposing Stalinism are not your motives and they are not my motives. But for you and I, for thousands and millions of others, the question concerning Stalinism is a matter of actual survival. For the American capitalists, in effect, it’s the same issue. It is for different reasons, but it is a question of survival. There is no fooling yourself about Stalinism. You either join it, support it, stay with it, or else it has only one statement to make to you: Death.
Trotskyi
sm, Farrell contended, had simply failed to organize “a sufficient fighting force with which to meet Stalinism.” In an ironic inversion of the Communists’ Theory of Social Fascism, Farrell announced that the deluded theories of both the Socialist Workers Party and the Workers Party were objectively the same as those of Stalinism.53
Goldman responded by agreeing that supporting capitalism was the only way to stop Stalinism, but he wished to do everything possible to differentiate his motives from those of his would-be allies. “Only a fool or a Stalinist can be against the Marshall Plan,” but, if he were a member of Congress, Goldman said that he would prefer to abstain rather than vote for the plan, unless his ballot proved to be the decisive one. He regretted having left the Socialist Party in 1937, and he dreamed of a new organization “uniting all the people who are for socialism [and] against capitalism and Stalinism into one propaganda organization. . . . Why should not I and you and Van [Heijenoort] and Felix [Morrow] and Max [Shachtman] and Sidney Hook belong to one organization in spite of all our differences?”54
Farrell was skeptical of both of these positions: for him, to support the Marshall Plan in practice yet refuse to give it a public endorsement implied a dangerous divorce between “feeling” and “formal ideas.” Establishing a propaganda league to promote socialism was also a dubious effort because socialism had to present practical proposals, and all practical proposals at the moment might well “only lead to sectarianism.” Farrell had come to believe that the Moscow trials should have been the turning point for the anti-Stalinist left. At that time, the true nature of Stalinism and the viability of democratic capitalism as the only means to fight it should have been recognized.55 He was following the road that had been earlier traveled by Sidney Hook. In the 1950s Farrell would serve as chairman of the Committee for Cultural Freedom and in the 1960s he would become an ardent supporter of Hubert Humphrey and a harsh critic of the New Left. By the 1970s his views on such issues as affirmative action and Israel were hardly distinguishable from those of the neoconservative writers for Commentary and The Public Interest.