More of the Same

FATHER AND SON--James T. Farrell--Vanguard ($2.75).

He wanted to purge himself completely of the world he knew, the world of 58th Street, with its God, its life, its lies, the frustrations he had known in it, the hates it had welled up in him. . . . Some day he would drive this neighborhood and all his memories of it out of his consciousness with a book.

Thus brooded young Danny O'Neill, a minor character in Studs Lonigan, James T. Farrell's hard-boiled chronicle of a poolroom slob in South Chicago's vast Shanty-Irish district. Studs Lonigan was really the book Danny O'Neill had in mind, but all its 1,108 pages did not purge his memory of its hates and bitterness. So Danny himself became the subject of two later novels: A World I Never Made (1936), No Star Is Lost (1938). This week appeared a third, Father and Son, bringing the story of Danny O'Neill to 1,761 pages with no end in sight.

Danny's father Jim, a good-hearted teamster with a fondness for Shakespeare, had little money, many children. Danny therefore lived with Grandmother O'Flaherty, shiftless Uncle Ned, passionate, self-pitying Aunt Margaret, Uncle Al who sold shoes on the road, read Chesterfield and Boswell. Father and Son traces Jim's decline through heart disease to his consecrated grave, Danny's rise through high school and adolescence to a job like his father's at an express agency.

Unintentionally significant is the scene in which Danny makes a general confession of all his young life's trespasses, receives absolution from the priest. Omniscient Oswald Spengler called autobiography a modern substitute for auricular confession. James T. Farrell has been pouring out powerful, bitter autobiographical tales for eleven years. But he has yet to feel artistic absolution, personal release from the tragic burden of his earlier environment. He plans a series of perhaps 50 volumes. The first 3,000 pages form a major contribution to U. S. literature. But his remorseless pictures of Irish-American life, from the sacristy to the public urinal, are growing repetitious.

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