Books: Portraits of Poverty

A WORLD I NEVER MADE—James T. Farrell—Vanguard ($2.50).

In the first four novels of James Thomas Farrell, the poverty-oppressed O’Neill family emerges as part of the background of Chicago’s South Side. A careful reader of the Studs Lonigan trilogy and of Gas-House McGinty would learn from these books that young Danny O’Neill is a good baseball player, that old Jim O’Neill is a wagon dispatcher who quotes Shakespeare, that Danny eventually escapes his environment. But he would get few intimations that James Farrell intended to explore their history as soon as his long study of Studs Lonigan’s disintegration was out of the way.

Last week, in the first volume of another series of novels, the O’Neill’s were shown occupying the centre of the same grim stage that the Lonigans recently vacated. Although they are poorer than the Lonigans, they are much like them in temperament: a quarreling, short-tempered, superstitious crew, constantly fighting among themselves and lapsing into dreamy reveries, the men regularly going on the wagon and as regularly falling off, the women snarling at the children, cursing the men, slandering each other. Consequently, while A World I Never Made does not deepen or add perspective to James Farrell’s picture of the life of Chicago’s lower-class Irish population, it widens the scope of that picture, is a forceful, frank but repetitious documentation of an aspect of it omitted from Farrell’s previous books.

The book begins in August 1931 when sly, timid, little Danny O’Neill has been taken into his grandmother’s home because his own parents are too poor to bring him up properly. Pampered by his pipe-smoking old grandmother, Danny suffers from loneliness, becomes a passionate student of big-league batting records, slowly learns a few of the facts of life from the brutal disclosures of his big brother Bill. He starts school, gets sick, snitches on Bill, gets beaten up, is becoming a moody, evasive, introspective child, ill at ease both in his own home and at his grandmother’s, when the book ends. Around his story revolve those of his kinspeople: Uncle Al is a shoe-salesman, a zealous defender of banal ideas and a tyrannical foster-father; Brother Bill is a sneak thief who has acquired a great store of misinformation about sex; Mother Lizz is a hard-hitting slattern whose great regret is that she did not become a nun; Aunt Margaret is a well-built hotel cashier whose love affair with a lumberman lifts her into the world of affairs and drives her to drink. The only warm-hearted character in the book is Jim O’Neill, who suffers as he watches his children being taken by relatives, suf fers more as he watches his dark-eyed, high-spirited little wife turn into the shouting, snarling, unkempt Lizz.

But even readers impressed with Author Farrell’s grimly powerful portraits of poverty are likely to be thrown off by their monotony, by his characters’ obsessed disgust with sexual and other bodily functions that has the strange effect of making them seem uniformly immature.