Content provided in partnership with
James T. Farrell's "The Dance Marathons." - in this issue, p. 133 - Irish-American Literature
MELUS, Spring, 1993 by Ellen Skerrett
It was with a sense of wonder and delight that I recently discovered James T. Farrell's 1931 report, "The Dance Marathons," in box 141 of the Ernest W. Burgess papers in the Department of Special Collections at the University of Chicago Library. For two years now, I have spent Saturday mornings reading my way through this remarkable collection for a book I'm writing on the Chicago Irish parish experience. Burgess was one of the most prominent members of the Chicago School of urban sociology, and he encouraged his students to explore the changing metropolis as part of their coursework.(1) Filling scores of folders, these student papers and exams from the 1920s and 1930s contain deeply personal accounts of the experience of city life as well as more traditional investigations into Chicago's netherworld - its gangs, speakeasies, dance halls, brothels, and rooming house districts.
- Most Popular Articles in Arts
- Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism
- Free-standing cardboard sculpture
- What makes a successful business person? Business people who are tops in ...
- Take advantage of local advertising: TV, newspaper or magazines? If your ...
- Tino Sehgal at the ICA
- More »
I owe an enormous debt to James T. Farrell. Reading Studs Lonigan and the Danny O'Neill novels provoked my interest in the history of the Chicago Irish. As a child growing up in the city I had little inkling of the Irish as a group. I knew Mrs. O'Leary had something to do with the Great Chicago Fire and that Richard J. Daley was the mayor. But they remained larger than life, like St. Patrick and St. Bridget, with little connection to me personally. Farrell's characters, on the other hand, could have been my relatives. Their patterns of speech, their attitudes about family, neighborhood, church, and race, all rang true. Like many other Farrell readers, my first reaction was, "I know these people." That working class Irish had a past, and a story to tell, was a revelation. Each Farrell novel I read enlarged my understanding - and sympathy - for the Chicago Irish and their often tenuous sense of place in the city.
As compelling as his depiction of Irish family life is Farrell's recreation of the Washington Park neighborhood on Chicago's South Side. In stunning detail he recreates the physical world of the Lonigans, O'Neills, and O'Flahertys - the brick three-story apartments they called home, their corner stores, the streets and boulevards they invested with meaning. It is no coincidence, I think, that Chicago begins for Studs Lonigan and Danny O'Neill in the neighborhood, just as it did for Farrell. The Chicago depicted in his novels is a familiar, circumscribed place where people are recognized by face, if not by name. Farrell's intimate portrait of the city reflects his experience growing up near Washington Park in the 1910s and 1920s. By his account, his boyhood neighborhoods were "little worlds of their own." Farrell recalled that his grandmother" was always a neighborhood character" and that he also became known, "the way a boy would be in a small town." Contributing to this sense of place and belonging was the local Catholic parochial school and Sunday mass, which rendered "the life of these neighborhoods ... somewhat more cohesive" ("Note" 164).
Like many Chicagoans, Farrell did not think of his city in the abstract, but rather in terms of the particular. When asked to compose an essay on "Chicago Beautiful" as a high school student, for example, he wrote about two South Side landmarks - Comiskey Park and the stockyards ("Note' 165). No doubt because he felt so intensely and observed so much during his childhood years, at age 75 the novelist's "mental map" of the Washington Park neighborhood was as rich as it had been six decades earlier.
In reading my way through the Burgess papers I thought often of the young James T. Farrell, who attended the University of Chicago for eight quarters between 1925 and 1929.(2) Although the Gothic campus in Hyde Park was only a few minutes walk from his boyhood neighborhood, it was a world apart. Shaped by the Irish Catholic parish, Farrell's experience of city life contrasted sharply with the academic community he encountered on the other side of Cottage Grove Ave. Edgar M. Branch has argued that the University of Chicago offered Farrell "earthly redemption ... from the authority of church and family and directed him to his profession" (32). In the late 1920s, Farrell was deeply influenced by three of the university's great thinkers - John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, and Thorstein Veblen.(3) Dewey's notion of shared experience as the highest human good, Mead's concept of social identity, and Veblen's theories on leisure and the deleterious effects of the industrial society were heady stuff for an aspiring writer. Indeed, in a 1932 essay, Farrell asserted that "there are professors and whole departments of the social sciences at the University of Chicago who owe any ideas they have to Mead and Dewey" ("Mead" 178).
So eagerly did Farrell embrace this new world of ideas that he worked long grueling hours as a service station attendant in order to pay tuition. Branch paints this portrait of Farrell in 1926-27: "standing over his filling station desk, his hands black with grease, he wrote down his moods and fantasies, his impressions of the neighborhood factory girls, prostitutes, and shopkeepers - in all, perhaps, some 60,000 words" (26). In addition to the reams and reams of yellow-lined paper he submitted for Prof. "Teddy" Linn's composition class - including much of what became Studs Lonigan - Farrell wrote extensively for the university newspaper and local journals, and he served as a campus reporter for the Chicago Herald & Examiner. Farrell's early writings reflect an original, curious mind, and they reveal his belief that "human emotions, feelings, desires, aspirations are valuable and precious" and deserve to be dignified in the consciousness ("Correspondence" 132).
