Family, Sex, and Church in the Novels of James T. Farrell
and Andrew M. Greeley
Ingrid H. Shafer
University of Science & Arts of Oklahoma
Starting with his second novel, Death in April, Andrew Greeley has shown his conscious appreciation of and preconscious debt to James T. Farrell by using Farrell's name and the names of some of Farrell's major characters, and by weaving selected Farrell images into his own fiction. Both authors, for example, compare the emotions of summer love with thirst for a cool drink (Studs 7; inter alia Ascent 43). Like Farrell, Greeley takes teenagers--their lives, loves, dreams, words--seriously. He also makes extensive and detailed references to Farrell in non-fiction books, such as his autobiography and assorted writings on the sociology of the Irish and/or Catholics in the United States.
Yet, when I started writing the first draft of this essay, I assumed I would be able to show not only Greeley's debt to Farrell but his rejection of Farrell's pessimistic cynicism which manifests itself in three major ways, (1) Farrell's wholesale indictment of the Irish-American family as destructive, devouring, and shackling, (2) Farrell's portrayal of Irish men as authoritarian, sexually bumbling drunks and Irish women as mindlessly pious, rigid, judgmental harpies who vent their frustrations by criticizing others and brutally crushing any sign of confidence, independence, and creativity among their children, and (3) Farrell's assumption that we can't go home again, and that romantic summer love is inevitably doomed to failure.
The second prong of this tentative double proposition was based on the contrast between the majority of Farrell's people with their stunted relationships and the strong, supportive multi-generational Irish families Greeley introduces in such series as Time between the Stars and The World of Maggie Ward. I also considered four biographical aspects of Greeley's life that seemed incompatible with such a harsh condemnation of the American Irish family and neighborhood: the fact that unlike Farrell Greeley has remained in Chicago, Greeley's fond memories of St. Angela's where he spent most of his childhood, Greeley's closeness to his sister's large family with whom he shares a vacation home, and Greeley's abiding affection for Christ the King parish in South Chicago's Beverly district where he served as Assistant Pastor for ten years after ordination. He wrote, in 1975, and again, in 1986: "I will never get over Christ the King. It is still my parish, still my neighborhood, and always will be."
In addition, I considered Greeley's vexation at the tendency of certain American Irish intellectuals not only to reject their own past but to be obsessed with denying that past to others by ridiculing the old neighborhood or denouncing it as irrelevant to the present (inter alia Communal Catholic 111). "If one reads James Farrell's Studs Lonigan," Greeley writes in 1976, "then one need not bother with any attacks by lesser writers on the narrow, wretched parochialism of the neighborhood, a place of 'spiritual poverty,' as Farrell puts it" (Communal Catholic 118). Five years later, in The Irish Americans Greeley objects to "sometime Irish Catholics" promoting the misleading stereotype of the cold, authoritarian, and repressive Irish family by blaming their personal and emotional problems on childhood and heritage (Irish Americans 149). Greeley insists that "at its best . . . the Irish organization of family life functions well," while he admits that "at its worst, it can be a disaster like the mythology claims" (Irish Americans 150).
The essay developed as planned until I encountered "The South Side Irish Since the Death of Studs," a crucial chapter in Greeley's 1972 volume, That Most Distressful Nation: The Taming of the American Irish. Suddenly my neatly constructed hypothesis developed cracks. How could my interpretation be reconciled with Greeley's melancholy vision when he ponders what he calls "the tragedy of the Irish" (Distressful Nation 246)? How could it account for the following passage?
If one is asked how the South Side Irish have changed since the death of Studs Lonigan, the answer is they haven't changed at all. The veneer may be different, but they are as bent on their own destruction as were Studs and all his friends who preceded him to the grave. Studs Lonigan was not destroyed by booze, nor women, nor the disastrous New Year's Eve party, nor by pneumonia. He destroyed himself. Dubious about his masculinity, harassed by his mother, nagged by his sisters, lacking a confident father to imitate, and paralyzed by guilt, Studs was already bent on self-destruction when he graduated from St. Anselm's in 1916. . . . Studs Lonigan loathed himself, and his whole life was a systematic effort to punish himself for his own worthlessness. (Distressful Nation 248-249)
Greeley hammers on relentlessly:
None of this has changed. The site has moved from Fifty-eighth and Indiana to Beverly, but the self-loathing and self-destruction continues. South Side Irish--a marvelously gifted and creative people--have been bent on destroying themselves for three-quarters of a century. It looks as though they are beginning to succeed. (Distressful Nation 250)
A latter day James Farrell, driven by at least as much bitterness and anger, Andrew Greeley diagnoses the disease sapping the life of the Irish as spiritual malaise: "Like his predecessor Studs Lonigan, a contemporary South Side Irish male is the master of romance day-dreaming, like Studs, he even understands vaguely that he has (Distressful Nation 250) the capacities to make the daydreams come true" (Distressful Nation 251), and also like Studs he can't bring himself to do so, because he is afraid! Greeley continues:
I am inclined to think that Beverly is indeed the end of the road for the South Side Irish. They will not get another chance. . . . And at least a few of us will lament that Beverly will not leave behind it a last will and testament like the Studs Lonigan trilogy. Beverly is both more fascinating and more tragic than Fifty-eighth and Indiana. But such a testament is not likely ever to appear, for, after all, what would people say? (Distressful Nation 254)
Greeley concludes his harsh assessment and dire predictions with a comment Daniel Patrick Moynihan made in the context of President Kennedy's assassination, "'We may laugh again, but we'll never be young again'" (Distressful Nation 260). Obviously, Greeley, at least prior to 1972, was considerably more likely to condemn his people than he was after he had begun to write--though not yet publish--fiction in earnest, around 1978. On the other hand, the very fact that he wrote the chapter means that after all, he had not really given up on the Irish Americans. He simply tried to whip them into shape, spur them on to live up to their considerable potential. He applied his self-acknowledged knack for confronting others rather than his still semi-dormant ability to affect them by gentle persuasion. Greeley the reformer was preaching a last-ditch scholarly hell-fire-and-damnation sermon to his former congregation!
Greeley did not actually read Studs Lonigan until he was about thirty, more than two decades after the final volume Judgment Day, was published. Joel Wells, editor of the Critic had asked Greeley to "re-read" the books to see how the South-side Irish had changed. He internalized Farrell's images of neighborhood, family, and especially of young love. As parish priest he felt deep empathy with Farrell's people. He wanted to halt the damage they were doing to themselves and each other, to heal them. But at the time his approach tended to be (as a stereotypical Irish male) confrontational. And so, eight years after he had exchanged the parish assignment for sociology and the academy he found himself doing exactly what John Chamberlain said Farrell had been up to in his Lonigan trilogy.1
In his 1938 introduction to the trilogy Farrell writes that he wanted to illustrate the effects of the disintegration of home and family, the institutions which socialize the young (Studs xiii). He considers Studs not only an individual but a type (Studs xi), "a normal American boy of Irish-Catholic extraction" (Studs xi) who was growing up in a pervasive social milieu of "spiritual poverty" (Studs xii) in a lower middle class neighborhood several steps removed from the dire indigence and illiteracy of immigrant slums. Farrell writes from personal experience. As many as nine of his siblings died as children. He was the second oldest of the six who lived to adulthood, and he may owe his life to the fact that he was taken out of his parental home's poverty by his maternal grandparents when he was three. On March 21, 1946 Farrell wrote to H. L. Mencken that living with his grandparents in relative comfort had given him a kind of double perspective by cutting him off the routine family life of his peers. He hoped that his novels presented:
something of an account or description of types of characters and types of action and conduct that is normal to the milieu I have described, and with this, something of an attempted revelation . . . from the inside; on the other hand, there is a certain attempted objectivity in presentation, and as I recall my moods and feelings when I wrote much of [my] fiction, I would feel so often outside of the material, and looking on. (Cited in "Plebeian Origin" 18)
Farrell was, in Chamberlain's words, writing a moral homily. "We have no mere 'slice of life' here; if anything we have a sermon. 'The wages of sin is death'" (Studs xii). While Farrell deliberately rejected the Church and was--at least in his late twenties--highly critical of St. Cyril High School, in fact he presents in his stories a secular version of the pre-Vatican II Fortress Church's obsession with guilt and sin.
Hence, contrary to my original assumptions, BOTH Farrell and Greeley are initially highly critical of the Irish-Americans, and particularly of the Irish-American family. However, by the time Greeley begins to write fiction in earnest he places his characters into a context of at least provisional hope. Supported by the sociologist, the Catholic priest and Celtic leprechaun-bard have won out over the academic and/or puritanical critic-preacher. In Greeley's imagination Farrell's tragic vision begins to open up to reveal the concealed comedy of grace.
Death in April, Greeley's first novel dealing with contemporary Irish Americans, presents Farrell-like characters, dialogue, setting, and even the protagonist's name (James O'Neill). Consider a day when Jim is eighteen. At the breakfast table, his father doesn't have a hangover and is quietly desperate instead of boisterous. His mother is fixing a hot breakfast for husband and sons despite their lack of appreciation. She accuses Jim of letting down the family because she somehow considered him responsible for losing a basketball game which might snare him a college scholarship. When she discovers that Lynnie Conroy gave him a ride home she starts in on the Conroy family. Jim objects to her calling Lynnie a slut. "'Look at him,'" his mother screeches, "'raising his voice to his own mother and defending a slut he parked with before he came home.'"(Death 45-47). That night Jim embraces Lynnie on the pier in the moonlight. Then he remembers his mother's voice. "'She's a slut! Everyone knows she's free with her favors!'" He wonders, "Who else but a slut would let him fondle her like this?" (Death 44). Here Greeley clearly puts the flesh of story on the bones of sociological findings. David Mayer cites Greeley in his discussion of Mrs. Lonigan and Mrs. Reilley: "In the examples of respectability and purity, we have seen the power that the Irish women possess. This power appears particularly in the relations between mother and son. Andrew Greeley, working with the study by Alexander Humphreys, says that the Irish mother waits on her sons and is not anxious to see them get married" (Door Stoops 20 citing Distressful Nation 99).
Eventually James O'Neill leaves for New York. Like Jim Farrell and his character Danny O'Neill he knows he has "got to try to write" (Death 56). Some twenty years later, successful but burned out, he returns, and sounds almost--but not quite--like a Farrell character as he talks with a friend in the evening Chicago rush hour's pedestrian high tide. He and Jerry Lynch are on Delaware Place, and Danny ties to locate the top of the Hancock building--which just happens to contain Andrew Greeley's apartment--in the grey mist, as he defines the essence of the intellectually mature man: "Sure. He learns you can't go home again, you can't become young again, you can't live your life again. So with this wisdom he passes gracefully over the bar, so to speak, and settles down to accept growing old." Worried, Jerry asks if he has "learned all these things." "'No way,' said O'Neill hollowly. 'I haven't learned a goddamn one of them--not yet anyway'" (Death 124). Eventually, in a definitely un-Farrell-like development he allows himself to be captured by his widowed magic princess and her teenage children.
What had happened to Greeley between 1972 and 1979 to allow him to transform tragedy into comedy? The Mother of Jesus had happened. Not the desiccated Virgin of bead-rattling piety, but the one he would eventually call Lady Wisdom. In 1975 Greeley had begun a study of the role of Mary in Catholic devotion. That study became a major turning point. As he put it in Confessions, "through preconscious processes I don't fully understand myself, theology and sociological theory merged and my future sociology as well as my storytelling--and my own prayer life--were heavily influenced, by the work that went into the Mary Myth" (Confessions 365). In Mary, Greeley discovered the womanly dimensions of God's love (Confessions 374) and eventually hidden reservoirs of tenderness within himself. He began to write about "a God of hope and a people of hopefulness despite themselves" (Confessions 350). Greeley's discovery of Mary within the Catholic tradition accounts for the difference between his earlier indictment of the Beverly Irish and his subsequent focus on their not-yet-aborted promise.
In his novels, written after his encounter with Mary, Greeley presents both a commentary on Farrell and an alternate vision. While Greeley fully acknowledges the negative tendencies among the Irish which Farrell attacks, he now sees potential for renewal. Neighborhood and family can be supportive, creative, positive. Through his stories, Greeley tries to illuminate the darkness of Stud's world by showing him (or those like him) that Lucy is a hint of God's love, that his instincts are right, that he shouldn't pay attention to his peers' tauntings and his mother's harping. Lucy is grace offered and rejected, a theme Farrell intuits but doesn't consciously develop or possibly even realize. For Farrell first loves are wholly illusory, leaving behind the poignancy of loss--thus Thelma of The Silence of History wanders through Eddie Ryan's life, giving it a momentary glow and casting the shadow of her absence across his future. She is lovely grace, but grace not for him (Silence 360-61).
If we turn from civil society to the parish level it becomes obvious that the post-Vatican Two church, if it were to follow a supportive Ryan clan family model, can overcome the obstacles built into the narrow, authoritarian, clerical, fortress church Farrell attacks from the outside and Greeley seeks to reform from within. David Mayer, in The American Neighborhood Novel, notes the contrast:
The values of loyalty, of a strong faith which strengthens and inspires its adherents are not to be found in the Irish neighborhoods depicted by Farrell. They can be found in Andrew M. Greeley's Lord of the Dance. . . . [While] Lord of the Dance recognizes the neighborhood's deficiencies[,] the personal ties, the hold on the feelings, and important religious values compensate for or at least balance the bad points of the Irish neighborhood. . . . The novels of James T. Farrell, especially the Danny O'Neill series, denigrate the neighborhood; the novels of Andrew M. Greeley, most explicitly, Lord of the Dance, celebrate the neighborhood. (Neighborhood Novel 127-29)
Eventually, Greeley would conceive of the fictional Ryan clan, at once antidote to Farrell's kind of guilt-ridden, abusive family and a model Greeley hopes the church might follow in the future. Irrepressible adopters of strays, the Ryans make their appearance in Virgin and Martyr. We learn that Pat (Packy) and Blackie are the sons of Ned and Katie, an ex-Communist who might have marched in the parade Mr. Lonigan encountered on his way home where his son lay dying of pneumonia. Golden-haired Mary Kate, their older sister and "assistant matriarch" (Virgin 27-28) will grow up to be Dr. Murphy., Ph.D., a psychotherapist, married to Dr. Joe Murphy, a Freudian analyst. Blackie is destined to become a priest, scholar, bishop, and solver of mysteries. But even the Ryans have a few skeletons in their family closet. Ned's sister Erin, for example, can't forgive Katie for her Communist past. She is also a religious fanatic who expects the end of the world in 1960 based on Padre Pio's predictions and the Fatima letters (Virgin 31) and almost destroys her daughter Kathy.
Today Greeley suspects that he preconsciously chose the name Ryan for his paradigmatic family in memory of Eddie Ryan, another Farrell character, two years older than Studs Lonigan, born like James Farrell in 1904, but born in a mind forty years older than that which created Studs, and unlike Studs capable of putting his dreams into words and projecting words into reality. A character much like Danny O'Neill. A character much like James Farrell. A character who like Greeley reads and quotes The Hound of Heaven (Silence 107, "Judith" 19, Patience ix). A character who might well have started Greeley's Ryan dynasty if he had decided to remain in Chicago instead of roaming the streets and lecture halls of Paris and New York in search of the elusive other/Other he would never quite find--maybe a woman such as Judith--in order to become fully himself. A character who like Greeley's Jimmie O'Neill or Hugh Donlon or Catherine Ryan or Red Kane or Neil Connor is afraid of being captured by the cosmic love pursuing him or her in the form of a persistent, demanding human lover. But a character who unlike Greeley's people keeps running, and running, and running.
In Greeley's imaginative neighborhood, the Ryans delight in their heritage, happily accept and occasionally adopt outsiders, encourage creativity in their young, and are confident of their own position in American life. In short, the Ryans are precisely the kind of people who represent another chance not only for South Side Chicago Irish but for people of all ethnic or national groups who understand that we can't respect others until we accept ourselves, and that we can't respect ourselves without accepting others.2
Greeley considers his pluralism the natural consequence of having grown up a Catholic in Chicago, and taking for granted that "our classmates would return to the kinds of parishes from which they came and practice a kind of Catholicism there which was both like and unlike our own" (Communal 146). He notes that "the pluralism of the archdiocese of Chicago was remarkably adroit. It was able to stitch together 'Americanization' and 'minority rights' within a structure which, if not exactly flawless. at least did not come apart at the seams. In retrospect it was, and is, an extraordinary achievement" (Communal 146). For Greeley the Catholic experience, incarnated in the noisy, teeming neighborhoods of Chicago, is a metaphor for the Kingdom of God on Earth as well as a model for global cooperation based on respect for cultural diversity.
In the decade following 1972, Greeley's hopefulness increased until he wrote in 1985, in a sonnet first in cautious code to a "rival" and now openly dedicated to Marilyn, a primary school classmate whom he had shyly admired from across the room when they were in eighth grade, "You were not misled, at fourteen by God's love:/ we shall be young once more, we shall laugh again!" (Confessions 76). The quiet, studious teenager, expecting to enroll in Quigley Minor Seminary, would store up "Van Gogh blossom" memories of this luminous woman-child, images which would merge almost two decades later with Farrell's Lucy Scanlan, and after another twenty years--braided with more recent impressions of teenage parishioners and water-skiing Grand Beach neighbors--take on life in a score of heroines, such as Lynnie of Death in April, Ellen of Cardinal Sins, Maria of Ascent into Hell, Megan of St. Valentine's Night, Mary Elizabeth of An Occasion of Sin, and Maura of Wages of Sin. Ironically, the young Farrell had a similar experience when he was in eighth grade. Part of him understood that his romantic love for Roslyn Hayes was not wrong but another part suspected that his adored Sister Magdalen--who treated any kind of association between boys and girls as sin ("Sister" 347)--would be offended, particularly since she had developed the belief that Danny had a vocation to the priesthood. He saw vocation as a burden, a sacrifice. "I would have to give up what I most wanted and cherished in the future" ("Sister" 361). Hence both Farrell's Lucy and Greeley's Lucy are reflections of adult memory of pubescent ardor. "I don't cry much," Greeley writes in his autobiography, "but I did when I read James Farrell's story of the summer romance of Studs Lonigan and Lucy Scanlan, one of the most touching accounts of young love ever written," adding, "If ever there were a vivid portrait of what happens when grace is refused . . ." (Confessions 12).
Greeley's increased hopefulness leads to a subtle but fundamental reassessment of Farrell's work. In the 1981 book, The Irish Americans: The Rise to Money and Power, Greeley suggests that Studs Lonigan did not fail because of spiritual poverty but rather because of psychological traits, "particularly those which drove him to destroy his relationships with women--rooted in his relationship with his own mother" or because of "a combination of bad health and the disaster of the Great Depression" (Irish Americans 135). After adding that many equally impoverished and emotionally crippled Irish not only survived the Great Depression physically but subsequently attained great material success (Irish Americans 135), Greeley suggest (only partially tongue-in-cheek) that "Perhaps, after all, the tragic flaw in Studs Lonigan was weak lungs" (Irish Americans 136).
Along with exploring the Celtic past, reading Mircea Eliade's books, and attending Eliade's lectures, reading Farrell was probably one of the main catalysts to help Greeley see that despite the rigid clerical moralism (or moralistic clericalism) of the Tridentine church there exists an ancient non-dualistic popular Catholic tradition of linking the religious with the erotic, the primal root of all families. After all, there would be no families if humans weren't pair-bonding creatures and the young did not need years of care. Symbolically, Easter as well as Christmas celebrate stages of procreation, and for most higher forms of life, procreation involves sexuality. Easter is about conception and Christmas about birth.
After a nonfiction elaboration on this theme--Sexual Intimacy (1973) and Love and Play (1975)--Greeley has a young bearded priests preach an Easter homily on God's love symbolized by the Vigil "blessing of the Easter waters in which the lighted candle is plunged three times" in his second novel, Death in April. The bearded young priest goes on, "This ancient symbol of intercourse tells us that we are thrust into life at the beginning of a passionate love affair to which we are invited to respond" (Death 100).
Both Farrell and Greeley explore the metaphoric potential of the Christmas season. The Christmas morning mass scene in Studs Lonigan (189-201), is much like the Midnight mass in Patience of a Saint (439-441), a mingling of sexual fantasy and liturgy. While Red Kane hasn't spent part of the night in a whore house, he does consider visiting his mistress after the eucharist. Instead, he finds himself assaulted by the Holy Spirit in his wife's arms as the congregation sings Adeste Fideles. Farrell implies that it is a sign of Studs' immaturity that he overlays the liturgy with sexual daydreams. He should have had the courage to reject the empty, superstitious ritual of the church. For Farrell the church is a big part of the problem, not a solution. In Mayer's words, "Instead of being a means of union with God and among people, religion for Farrell's Irish seems to be a club to pummel one's enemies and a salve to soothe one's conscience" (Door Stoops 22).
Greeley, on the other hand, presents paradigmatic priests, such as fathers Blackie Ryan, "The Ace" McNamara, Jamie Keenan, Mugsy Branigan, John Raven, Brendan McNulty, and Lar McAuliffe, all deeply committed to encouraging their parishioners to develop spiritual maturity, self-confidence, and acceptance of themselves as healthy sexual animals, capable of passion, commitment, and intimacy. Greeley even introduces an Irish-American bishop, Sean Cronin, who becomes an empathetic, compassionate priest after he sees himself worthy of forgiveness and learns to stop running away from the self-generated demons of guilt. Thus the Ace talks about Saint Valentine (actually two first century priests who got tangled up in the popular imagination with the lupercalia, a Roman spring fertility festival, by getting themselves martyred at just the right time of the year): "Yeah, he's the patron of romantic love, you know. So the laity have a romantic dance, after a Mass and renewal of marriage vows, on St. Valentine's night. It's called locally Father Ace's St. Valentine's Night Dance, because I let them do it. And that's odd because I'm the only one who doesn't have a wife to renew vows with" (Lord 159). Obviously, like his creator, the Ace recognizes that sexual attraction may be the most powerful foreplay of God's love available to human beings.
In Greeley's parish, what better place than church to fantasize about the girl or guy one hoped to meet and bed one day (Studs 193)? Studs would not need to feel guilty. Granted, Studs' memories of a drunken Christmas eve in a whore house are not exactly inspirational literature, but if his parents and peers and pastor hadn't instilled so much insecurity and sexual anxiety he would probably feel free to pursue Lucy by some name or another and believe that he deserved her love. Much like Studs, Hugh Donlon of Greeley's Ascent into Hell is afraid to follow his inner voice. A dutiful son, he rejects the woman he wants to marry to please his mother. Unlike Studs he actually becomes a priest. Eventually, he leaves the priesthood, marries an ex-nun, has an affair with a former parishioner and her daughter, is discovered by her husband who has a stroke, crashing into the Christmas tree and crushing the creche with his fist (Ascent 340).
Obviously, Greeley is no less aware than Farrell of the demonic potential of the id and twisted family relationships.3 Yet, he continues to have faith in the future of the family. In a seasonal 1988 newspaper column he writes: "The crib scene specifies the symbolism; Even on the darkest night, life is stronger than death; the cosmos is about birth, not about death; the joy over the coming of a baby is hint of joy that never ends; the Ultimate Power of the universe loves us like a mother loves a newborn child." He goes on "The power of such symbolism is inexhaustible. The world may not be the way the crib scene says it is. But as long we humans hope that life and love and birth are the ultimate realities, the crib symbol will exorcise any threats to its richness ad force.. . . "We may forget a few days afterward the enchantment the crib casts over us. Yet the image remains stored away in the back closet of our brain, a picture of hope and possibility" (25 Dec. 88)).
It is profoundly ironic that Farrell who rejected the Church and dropped out of the University of Chicago is the one who accuses the Irish-Americans of spiritual poverty and materialism (an indictment of which both dogmatic liberal academics and the Pope might approve) while Father Greeley, Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and now Professor there, as well as much-cited author in precisely the field which so fascinated Farrell, sociology, defends the people, and continues to believe in their promise, while soundly criticizing the Church but refusing to give up on her.
Works Cited
Farrell, James T. "Judith." Judith and Other Stories. New York: Doubleday, 1973. 1-74.
---. "Sister." Judith and Other Stories. New York: Doubleday, 1973. 339-363.
---. Studs Lonigan: A Trilogy. New York: Modern Library, 1932, 1934, 1935.
---. The Silence of History, New York, Doubleday, 1963.
---. What Times Collects. Doubleday, 1964.
Greeley, Andrew M. That Most Distressful Nation: The Taming of the American Irish. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1972.
---. "'Nothing But a Loud-Mouthed Irish Priest.'" Journeys. Ed. Gregory Baum. New York: Paulist, 1975.
---. The Communal Catholic. New York: Seabury, 1976
---. Confessions of a Parish Priest: An Autobiography. New York: Pocket Books, 1987.
---. The Irish Americans: The Rise to Money and Power. (1981) New York, Warner, 1988.
---. The Catholic Myth. New York: Charles Scribner's Son, 1990.
---. "All Our Abuses Cannot Quell the Christmas Spirit." Chicago Sun-Times 25 Dec. 1988.
---. Death in April. 1980. New York: Dell, 1984.
---. The Cardinal Sins. New York: Warner, 1981.
---. Thy Brother's Wife. New York: Warner, 1982.
---. Ascent into Hell. 1983. New York: Warner, 1984.
---. Lord of the Dance. New York: Warner, 1984.
---. Virgin and Martyr. New York: Warner, 1985.
---. Patience of a Saint. New York: Warner, 1987.
---. St. Valentine's Night. New York, Warner, 1989.
---. An Occasion of Sin. New York, Putnam, 1992.
---. Wages of Sin. New York, Putnam, 1991.
Mayer, David R. The American Neighborhood Novel. Nagoya, U of Nagoya P, 1986.
---. Door Stoops and Windowsills: Perspectives on the American Neighborhood Novel. Kyoto: Yamaguchi, 1992.
11 February 1994 2:08am
Posted on the Web 6 January 2002
Copyright © 2002 by Ingrid Shafer
1Ironically, Farrell had begun this tale of lower middle class American Irish despair when he was only 24, a sometime student at the University of Chicago, and little Moran Greeley (as he was known at the time) was a seventeen months old blue-eyed tow-headed toddler whose Dad would get off the double deck bus on Austin Boulevard and sweep him cheerfully up into his arms, calling him partner.
2In the 1981 book, written around the time when he was working on his third novel, The Cardinal Sins, Greeley uses statistical analysis to make a number of points which he would subsequently illustrate and spin out in fiction. He notes that a major difficulty of Irish family life involved reluctance to express love and affection (Irish Americans 150) but that this tendency toward aloofness did not extend to sexual repression. The Irish are passionate, and make love slightly more frequently than other Americans. While he agrees that the stereotype of the domineering Irish mother is based on fact, he chides the detractors of Irish culture for generally failing to acknowledge its positive corollary, that Irish Catholics, men as well as women, "are the most likely of any gentile ethnic group to endorse the pro-feminist position" (Irish Americans 151) and approve of career women, even a female president (Irish Americans 156), and the ordination of women. Hence he strongly disagrees with another stereotype, that of the Irish Catholic family as limiting women to the roles of housewife and mother, and producing frustration and misery (Irish Americans 152) among both genders. As a matter of fact, he argues, surveys show that Irish Catholics are more satisfied with life and less alienated than most other Americans; they are more likely to consider their lives and their marriages as very happy, their health excellent, and their financial condition above average and improving (Irish Americans 155). They spend a considerably amount of time talking with their children and each other (Irish Americans 153). While their attitudes toward premarital or extra-marital sex are similar to those of other Americans, the Irish Catholics are 13 percentage points less likely to consider homosexuality always wrong (Irish Americans 156). Irish-American family life may be filled with paradoxes, but their "success and satisfaction scores are above the average"(Irish Americans 159).
3One of Farrell's most devastating portrayals of multi-generational family life steeped in sexual perversion and religious mania is the mismatch of Anne and Zeke Daniels who live, in Zeke's terms, in "wedded piss" (What Time Collects 4). Her grandfather had been "a minister of God, who had tried to flog virtue" (15) into her father Zack. On his wedding night, Zack forced his bride to kneel naked next to their honeymoon hotel bed to pray. Then he raped her cruelly. Finally he asked her to kneel again, to pray for forgiveness for having sinned (15). Understandably, Anne's mother despised both men and sex, observing that "the Devil was in men's britches; and he gave a woman only pain and tribulation" (13). She described the mouths of Hell swallowing up painted harlots in gaudy silks and satins along with the men whose lusts of the flesh had tormented the women. There would be few men in the blessed land beyond the river Jordan because most of those weak creatures lusted after women's flesh (12-13). Furious with her abusive husband, Anne gets drunk and sleeps with mousy Archibald, the result of his mother's affair with her twin brother. The imagery is reminiscent of the demons which haunt another Anne, Greeley's heroine Anne Reilly of Angels of September and Andrea King of the Search for Maggie Ward, two women abused by parents and priests.